Alex

Let this be a warning to all of you out there. Fall asleep on my sofa and you’re fair game for a portrait. This is my oldest son, Alex. He’d had a busy weekend and decided to crash out on the sofa and snore his head off rather than going to bed. I thought the foreshortened head and some of the flesh shapes looked interesting so took a sneaky photo and saved it with my painting ideas. This is Alex’s second appearance on this blog.

I painted this one with the crystalline watercolours so started, as usual, by creating a three value plan, putting down pencil outlines and making out all the highlights. Then I sprinkled crystals everywhere and painted over the dark areas with a wet brush. I’m normally pretty indiscriminate with the darks but today I worked from the back to the front and smoothed over them in places with kitchen paper to create some volume. Once it was dry, I sprinkled crystals over all the medium tines, sprayed them with water and dabbed everything off with kitchen paper. After stepping back and looking at the result, I decided that the red curtain in the background was too jarring, so I sprinkled crystals over the curtain and the wall behind it, sprayed them with water and blended everything with vertical strokes of kitchen paper. And that was me done.

It’s not too bad, this one. I like the green and red background on the right and wish I’d had this all across rather than having a bit of sofa in the top left. Lots of the background and foreground have an abstract quality, suggesting Alex is dreaming while he sleeps. But the two thinks I like most about this one (both unintentional) are that it looks like (i) a mountain range landscape, and (ii) a portrait of me. I’ve been known to enjoy a good snooze on that some sofa; there’s a certain type of snooze for which a sofa is more comfortable than a bed. Being a portrait of a family member, this one’s not going up for sale.