Albert King

I started by putting down pencil outlines using a grid.  I picked a source photo of Albert with his famous flying V guitar, Lucy, planning on letting Lucy overlap any portraits behind her.  In retrospect this was a bad decision as it meant that the heads on these portraits were small, making them too fiddly to extract a likeness.  Oh well.

Colour–wise, you’ll have worked this out already but the bottom layer was tundra pink in the left, Shire yellow and Shire olive in the middle and desert orange and desert yellow on the right.  Then the second layer was tundra blue on the left, Shire green and Shire blue in the middle and desert brown on the right.  And the final layer was tundra purple on the left, forest brown and green apatite genuine in the middle and desert grey and desert green on the right.  Whenever each layer went down, I tried to tease out the granulation by dotting in water, thicker paint and granulation medium.  I even threw on a bit of salt as the last layer was drying.

After each layer I put on some random brush marks behind the figures to contrast against the white shirt and this worker really well.  I’ll definitely be doing that again.

But otherwise this is a bit of a flop and won’t be going in the shop window.  This doesn’t look like Albert.  It looks more like another guitarist called John McCoy (I had to look him up) or like Colonel Sanders.  I definitely beed to paint bigger head if I’m going to do more of these triple portraits.  Colour-wise I think I prefer the conventional colours to the supergranulators in these triple portraits.  I’ll still do triple layer portraits with the supergranulators but might just save them for individual portraits.  Or should I give them one more go in a triple portrait but with bigger heads?  Leave it with me.