Mark Knopfler

Today I have been mostly painting a portrait of Mark Knopfler. As one of my all time favourite guitarists, it’s criminal that I’ve not painted him up to this point.

It’s a posterised painting using the trippy scheme and following my usual process for such paintings. I spattered on some masking fluid stars at the beginning and sprinkled on some salt at the end. The stars came through but the salt’s effects are barely visible and, even then, only in a couple of places.

Before the masking fluid came off, I was convinced that this would look more like Keith Richards but that last step never fails to surprise me. It’s definitely Mark Knopfler coming through. One thing slightly off about the final result though, at least for me, is that there are lots of darks and highlights in there but very few mid tones. It’s easy to slip into three value posterised paintings in the trippy scheme as a default and I might be guilty of that today. If some of those highlights were darker or some of those darks lighter, I might have ended up with a more sensible distribution of values than the two full pots and one teaspoon that I ended up with here. Still, this is easily good enough to go up for sale. The price can be found here.