For my second portrait today I had another go at Joe Walker. This actually my…
Private Joe Walker
Next up is Private Joe Walker, played by James Beck, one of my favourite two characters in this TV show. What I liked about the source photo was the two tone background with a dark colour at the top contrasting with the light hat and the light colour at the bottom contrasting against the dark overcoat. I made a first attempt at Joe yesterday, again starting with a dark grey and adding some lighter greys for mid values but this time I threw in some dark blue on the tie.
Here’s where I stopped working:
I wasn’t happy with this one, so didn’t post it here, intending to have a go at rescuing things today. My two biggest issues were the overcoat not really working and the blue in the tie being too jarring, even mod my purposes.
So this morning I identified another problem, which was that the dark grey wasn’t as dark as I wanted it to be. So I went over all my dark greys with a black marker, giving everything a more noir look and making Joe look a bit shiftier. At the same time, I went over whole overcoat in black, deciding that it was more important that the black colour dominate the painting than that I showed off all the highlights and creases. I also went over some of my light grey midtones with slightly darker greys.
I did. have a plan in reserve, which was to replace the white in the background with light blue of the dark blue in the tie was still too jarring but I thought it was fine, so held off. I did., though, add a medium grey shadow on the wall behind Joe just use the amount of white on show and added some marks on the wall. Both or these increased the noiriness of the painting. And that was me done.
Just like Sergeant Wilson, Joe’s recognisable but the likeness isn’t quite right. And I’m not keen on that black mark down the right edge of his face, even if it was there in the source photo. But there’s that noir mood coming through. He looks genuinely shifty. This feels like real life rather than a cozy family sitcom. The collection’s starting to come together.
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