A Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man

After two days off I needed to get back to painting today but didn’t have much time available, so went for the Inktense pencils, with no long drying delays and no mess to clear up afterwards. I thought I’d have a go at a posterised portrait and picked out one of my junior school photos from around 1972-73.

I tried repeating the formula from my Rush painting a year ago. So the colours are sherbert lemon, Persian red and violet. The yellow went down first, then the red, then the violet. And I wet the darkest areas first, then the mediums, then the lights.

What I ended up with wasn’t great:

• I’d put on the violet right nostril too far to the right. Inktense pencils are staining and pretty unforgiving but I managed to partly disguise the rogue dark shoe using a white Inktense pencil, along with more of the yellow and red. And I put down a dark shape in the correct place.
• I improved the painting in some places by turning lights to mediums and mediums to darks, getting ideas about what to change by moving the sliders in the Notanizer app.
• There’s other stuff that’s not right. The eyes may be a bit too small and the mouth either in the wrong place or at the wrong angle. And this is because, while I used a grid to get the initial outlines down, everything else was drawn in by eye without the use of a ruler to nail the accuracy. It’s something I need to start doing if I’m ever to be a great artist and if I’m going to be working without a safety net, why not do that in a self portrait with Inktense pencils that was never going to be put up for sale?

So, yeah, a pretty bad one today but a useful exercise. This one’s not going up for sale.