And, By The Way, Which One Is Pink?

With most of the paint on the Schmincke dot card used up, I thought I’d have another go at an abstract portrait rather than have them sitting around for years. With the titanium yellow, cobalt violet hue and cobalt turquoise all having already disappeared, I was down to 21 colours, so took the decision to stagger some of my squares so that the three missing colours weren’t noticed. And with the result looking like bricks in a wall, I picked out Roger Waters as my subject, picking a dark photo with half his face lit up to maximise the amount of paint on the paper and to avoid any “white squares”.

So, the process I followed was like this:

• I marked out a normal 6×4 grid of squares on the paper, far enough away from the edges for none of it to be hidden by the mount after framing I transferred over the image from my notanized source photo
• I put in the (shifted) vertical edges of my squares in the second, fourth and sixth rows and erased the previous, now redundant, vertical edges
• I masked out the edges of all the squares and all the highlights and spattered on making fluid to keep the squares with no highlights interesting
• Then I painted in all the squares with my 21 different colours. With everything that I wanted to leave unpainted masked, this was quick, not requiring much skill
• To put some sort of sky-like background behind the wall and emphasise that it’s not a real wall (listen to the album) I wet all the background and put in random colours by sweeping the brush over the drying dots on the card and then dropping the colours into my wet sky wash
• I removed all the masking fluid and stepped back to look at the painting to think about whether the likeness could be improved
• I added a little bit of blue in two of the squares to make it clearer that one of the big white areas was a highlighted nose against a highlighted cheek

And that was me done. It’s also me done with the Schmincke dot card with eight colours now used up and most of the rest almost there. Still, it was fun to use it to produce these three paintings.

If you know this is supposed to be Roger, you can recognise him, and his right eye in particular. But if you don’t know who it is, this is a challenging painting. To make it more challenging I’m naming it after a line from Have A Cigar rather than after Roger. Any Colour You Like was another possibility but it turns out Roger had no hand in writing that track. And I like how this one has ended up. The pattern of squares feels more pleasing to the eye than the grid of squares that I used for Salvador Dali and the sky background adds a sense of mystery to the story. Roger’s up for sale.