Mighty Mouse

Yesterday’s painting was bad, very bad. I just had to come back and have another go at Kevin Keegan, acting in some of the lessons I’d learned while they were still fresh.

I picked exactly the same photo as before and divided it up into three values (highlights, lights, darks) using the Notanizer app. After that, the process was to:

• put down a pencil outline using a grid. The focus here was entirely on marking out the three different valued areas – I wasn’t thinking about facial features or anything like that
• reserve all the highlight areas using masking fluid. This meant having using a lot more masking fluid than normal as I was masking out all of the whites and not taking a shortcut by only outlining any big areas – keeping watercolour out of fenced off areas is one thing, doing the same with crystallised watercolour and water sprays is another. I also put on some random spatters of masking fluid.
• sprinkle watercolour crystals everywhere, generally bark purples/greys round the important eye/nose/mouth dark areas and yellow in the background but otherwise pretty random
• wet the crystals in the dark areas with a brush and paint in all those dark areas. I used a small pointed brush for this so that I could make the eyes and mouth detailed. Rather than just painting everything as quickly as possible, I diluted the darks in different places, revealing different colours and tried to blend them into each other in between. It was important to keep cleaning my brush.
• add more crystals to any light areas that were looking empty, then spray water all over those areas. The resulting colours were looking quite dark, so I dabbed off a lot of water and pigment with kitchen towels to keep them light.
• remove all the masking fluid.

It was only after I removed the masking fluid that I could properly see what I’d achieved here and I’m really happy with the result. The painting is clearly separated into highlights, lights and darks and the darks are detailed enough for some likeness and personality to have emerged. I can see Kevin’s pride, humility and imposter syndrome in those eyes. A very good day in the studio today. Maybe I could have used fewer crystals but otherwise everything seems to have gone according to plan. Kevin’s up for sale.