Ross Kemp: Go With Your Gut

For the subject I picked out Ross Kemp.  I’ve already done quite a facetious portrait of this TV legend and thought I should have a go at doing him properly.  So not just because his lack of hair makes him easier to paint.  If that was the only reason, I’d be spending most of my time painting still lives of potatoes.

I again put down pencil outlines using a grid and concentrating on facial features rather than on the value shapes that the Artist Assist App was recommending.  And I used the same colours as for Pigpen.  Excuse me while I copy and paste…  For the first layer I used transparent yellow on the left and in the middle and rose dore on the right.  Then it was cerulean blue in the left and Winsor red in the middle and on the right.  And finally French ultramarine as the third layer in all three sub-portraits.  Because there’s both a warm and a cool blue in there, I can’t classify this under a single colour key.  One thing I did differently to the Pigpen painting, though, was that I added a spatter of French ultramarine at the end.  I just felt like it.

So with nothing much to say about the techniques, let’s talk about the painting and the lessons learned.

– First things first.  From start to finish this took three hours, not including finding the source photo, adjusting brightness and putting it through the Art Assist App.  So something like this would definitely be doable on PAOTY, especially when there’s a one hour break in addition toothed four hours when I could potentially still be painting.

– It was only when I finished this one that I realised I’d committed a major screwup.  Because Ross was looking to the right in my source photo, I’ve put the biggest portrait on the left of the painting – if I’d put the big portrait on the right, the viewers’ eyes would have been drawn out of the painting.  And because I was half on autopilot, I worked from cool colours on the left to warm on the right, just like I did for Pigpen.  This was just dumb.  The warm colours needed to be in the biggest portrait because warm colours come forward and cool ones recede.  Oh well.

– I’m thinking that rather than drawing in features with pencil I should try drawing in the recommended value shapes, especially the darkest shapes.  This would make it much easier for me to painting the shapes and achieve a likeness.  Speaking of which…

– The likenesses aren’t quite there today.  The big portrait is OK I guess, definitely recognisable.  And I’ve captured the smirk and the way his eyes re looking upwards.  But the likeness starts to drop off in the other two, mainly because I wasn’t sure exactly where to put my middle and dark shapes.  If I screw up my eyes the middle Ross might be passable but the one on the right looks more like the other potato brother from Eastenders.

– The blue spatters are interesting.  Sometimes a painting will need them; sometimes it won’t.  It’s something worth keeping in my back pocket ready for action if required.

Overall, I reckon Ross is worth a place in the shop window.  The name of the painting includes my favourite catchphrase of his and needed to be more than just Ross Kemp, that name already being taken by my earlier effort.