Got The Rain In My Face

The FIDE Candidates tournament is on at the moment and I’m already addicted after three of the fourteen rounds. So I’m watching the chess all afternoon in the iPad. That’s why I’ve been using the crystalline watercolours today: after marking down the outlines of the highlights and the darks and masking out the highlights, I’m done with my source photo so the iPad gets freed up.

My subject today is Chris and Rich Robinson of The Black Crowes, but performing at a concert in their own names. I followed my usual process for crystalline watercolours:

• Create a three value plan and mark, it out on hotpressed watercolour paper using a grid
• Reserve all the highlights with masking fluid
• Sprinkle over random crystals and use a wet brush over them to paint in all the darks. It’s important to only use small strokes, keep rinsing the brush and let adjacent colours mix naturally: going over everything at once with a full brush will only cover everything with the first colour that the brush comes into contact with.
• Once that’s dry, sprinkle crystals over the mid tones, spray with water, leave for a few seconds and soak off all the water by pressing down with kitchen paper
• Remove all the masking fluid.

Maybe I made a mistake today by copying the value plan that the Notanizer app came up with. I think I’d have been better off turning all the mid tones on Chris’ face (top left) into highlights. The mid tones that I ended up with are barely distinguishable from the darks in the background, which is a shame because Chris’ nose looks quite beaky, quite apt for a Black Crowe. Instead I’ve ended up with a painting that’s more abstract than portrait, although the portrait is there if you look hard enough. It does work as an a abstract though, with that interesting white oscillating shape running down the diagonal. I’m going with the abstract theme by naming it after a line from the song being performed (Over The Hill by John Martyn). I even considered rotating the painting by 90, 180 or 270 degrees before deciding that this orientation worked best. This one’s up for sale, with the price to be found here.