Smile You Son Of A Bitch

It’s a rest day in the FIDE masters and, with no chess to watch, I’ve been 100% focused on painting. Today’s subject is Roy Scheider starring as Martin Brody in Jaws, mother of those films that keeps coming on at about 9 or 10pm on evenings when I have the telly to myself. It’s a film I never tire of.

This might look like a posterised portrait but I’m not classifying it as one because there wasn’t any layering. I wanted to follow a similar process to The Wrong Kind Of Snow, putting down the darks first and the mid tones afterwards. Both layers were mixtures of four of the super supergranulators (pink, blue, orange and green). For the darks, I put down the four colours randomly and allowed them to merge together. The second wash was much more watery and was mainly tundra pink, with the other three colours dropped in here and there. The second wash didn’t overlap the first one.

Because the white space was quite limited on this one and included a lot of small and intricate islands, I did mask them all out, which is something I’d generally rather not do for paintings in this style. It did mean, though, that I had all the fun of not knowing whether the painting had worked before removing the masking fluid. The pointing is named after what I always say as I remove the masking fluid hoping for a likeness.

I’m going to say this one is a success. The likeness was there when the masking fluid came off and the gun drags the viewer’s eyes into Brodie’s, for which Spielberg has to take the credit. Another plus is the colour variety in the big dark shape. I think I might have been better off making this one a posterised painting, though. Maybe a three value tundra scheme painting like Big Ron Atkinson. It feels to me like the style I used today works best without masking fluid, when I can be looser and more spontaneous with that second, watery wash. That wash felt too much today like colouring by numbers. But a decent result though. The Chief is up for sale, with the price to be found here.