Alexander Grischuk

Still tearing through the players at the 2020 FIDE Candidates tournament, starting today with Alexander “Sasha” Grischuk.  He’s drawn all seven of his games so far after getting into good positions but not leaving himself enough time on the clock to find the win.  He’s spending 40 of 50 minutes on single moves when he only has 120 minutes to make a single mood.

I thought I’d experiment a bit more with this one.  I included some green and yellow in the flesh tones to make him look a bit less human.  And I added the big pink spotlight behind him to contrast with the greens and to give the impression that he’s going into a really deep think.

End result?  Well the experiments both worked out well.  The likeness isn’t there but that’s becoming a common theme.  And there’s something about my style that’s unifying the collection together, even though they’re all very different so far, which I quite like.

The worst thing about this one is that it’s in landscape format, which will make framing the set tricky. Are there frames around with eight apertures?  Three portrait along the top and bottom and two landscape in the middle?  If there is, then I need to draw one of the remaining four players in landscape format.

Actually, make that two bad things.  I’m worried now that the spotlight looks like the flag of Japan and makes Sasha look Japanese.