Alan Davies

Right, time to get down to some proper work and to produce some posterised paintings that will impress the Portrait Artist Of The Year judges when they come calling. The days still feel short, so I set my alarm to wake me up this morning, rather than relying on the sun rising. I was back from my walk and showered by about 11:00 and able to get started in the morning.

For today’s subject matter I picked actor and comedian Alan Davies. He has one of those faces that demands to be painted. While playing with his photo in the Notanizer app, I found that a three value composition would work just a well as two, so I repeated the technique that I used for Phil Lesh back in October that I’ve decided to add to my portfolio of posterised colour schemes and call the trippy colour scheme.

After putting down a pencil drawing using a grid, I masked out all the white highlights. Once the masking fluid was dry, I filled up all the non highlighted areas with strokes of transparent yellow, Indian yellow, rose dore, Winsor red, quinacrinone magenta, cerulean blue, Winsor blue (green shade) and viridian and encouraged them to mix together on the paper by spraying on some water. When the paint was almost dry I sprinkled on some salt. I got the timing right today: the salt effects come through strongly. Here’s how the painting looked at this stage:

At this stage, the painting looks nothing like Alan and it’s an endless source of joy for me to compare final versions of paintings to these incomplete, messy versions.

Once the first layer was dry, the next step was to add a French ultramarine glaze over all the darks. Not all my initial pencil marks were showing through the first layer of paint, so a lot of this stage was freestyle, either with a pencil providing outlines for me to fill in or directly with the brush.

And once everything was dry, I removed the masking fluid, brushed off any remaining salt crystals and stepped back to review the painting. And it looked great. I’ve got the likeness and there’s a brilliant three dimensional effect from the stripy t-shirt. And as an unexpected bonus, the messy paint marks around his mouth give Alan an air of The Joker in this one.

Alan’s up for sale, with the price to be found here.