Liron Yanconsky

After portraits of a music reactor, a mathy, a physicist, a chess nut boasting in an open foyer and a foodie, surely everyone out there knew that the final member if the YouTube six would be an artist?

This is Liron Yanconsky who has a great YouTube channel on watercolour painting.  There are some other art channels also worth mentioning here:

– Jean Lurssen’s Watercolours where I learned everything I know about acrylic inks

– Steve Mitchell at The Mind Of Watercolour

– Liz Chaderton with her loose line and wash paintings

– Peter Cronin, master of the three layer approach

– The Art Gear Guide, which does exactly what it says on the tin

– and Teoh Yi Chie, an urban sketcher, although I only tend to check his channel for book reviews.

I picked Liron as my subject for this one, though, because he’s the YouTuber I feel closest to.  He does lots of live videos where he interacts with his subscribers and, of course, he did recently critique some of my paintings.

After the MacMaster ended up much more colourful plan planned this morning, I decided that for Liron to complement the rest of the team he’d have to be done in brown.  I only have the one brown marker but I picked out a couple of my flesh tones that could work as lighter value browns.  As well as these, I used an ivory marker as I didn’t want the wall in the background to just be white.

Other than that, I just followed the same technique as for the rest of the YouTubers.  A 5×7 grid, pencil guides down, rub out as much of the grid as possible while keeping the pencil outlines, then apply the markers, starting with the dark colours first.  The great thing about starting with those dark colours is that once they’re down, all the pencil lines can be rubbed out.

Oh, and one of the things I’ve just realised about these six portraits is that I haven’t drawn any pen or marker outlines around the shapes.  Whenever I’ve wanted an outline to be really clear, I’ve tried to put it in as a shape or, even better, as a negative shape .  And this seems completely natural.  I think I’ve left pen and marker outlines behind in these mini portraits.

But how was the painting?  I guess it’s OK.  There’s a likeness and the values have worked out with the brown palette but it feels a little bit cartoony.  It wasn’t easy finding a photo of Liron without a toothless smile and that expression and the chubby cheeks do detract a bit from what’s a decent likeness.  And the the hair on the head and the face both feel a bit lazy, adding to the cartooniness if anything.  Still, Liron’s up for sale but if the man himself wants this it’s his for free.