And It Makes Me Wonder

Looks like I’m taking a break from LAOTY and PAOTY prep this week then because today I fancied giving the crystalline water colours their first outing of the year. This is Jimmy Page from Led Zep, someone I’ve had a go at once before but who deserves a better portrait.

The first step was to come up with value plan, mark it out on the paper and reserve the whites. One of the good things about crystalline watercolour is that I can rub out my pencil lines until they’re almost invisible. I can still see the lines when masking out highlights or painting over darks: this is the benefit of the midtones being the last step.

Next it’s the darks. I wanted things to be quite bright today, so sprinkled over pyrole (sic) red, orange, buttercup, leaf green, pthalo blue (GS) and quonacridone (sic) magenta and then painted over the marks. I tried to get them to mix by applying lots of water in lots of random places and trying not to brush one colour into another. As you can see, the crystals decided today to come through with lots of greens and reds.

The third is the midtones. I didn’t want these to be darker than what were supposed to be darks in the first layer, so I dropped the blue and magenta and replaced the pyrrole red with poppy red. I sprinkled these over all the white areas left showing on the paper, sprayed them with water, left them for a few seconds, then put kitchen paper down on them and pressed it down hard. When I removed the paper, I found that the midtones had come out as predominantly yellow and that, in a potentially disastrous development, a lot of pigment from the first layer had lifted off.

But, you know, these paintings are never over until I’ve removed all the masking fluid. And, once I’d done that, I felt better about the painting. The lighter patch in the hair and the cauliflowers everywhere just added to the impression that everything had all been thrown at the paper randomly and that an image had emerged by accident. If anything, I was slightly disappointed by the eyes and wishing that the darks indicating the nose and mouth had been darker. Still, I thought Jimmy was good enough to go up for sale.

But then somehow I smeared some paint above Jimmy’s left eye. I tried to wet it and lift it off but this time the paint wanted to stay put and I’d only managed to make the blemish bigger. So I went over all the highlights on the face with my wet brush to bring them into line. There was no longer a big enough distinction between the highlights and the midtones and that tipped this one over into being a flop.

But there’s more. ChatGPT had so many positive things to say about this one that I decided it was worth rescuing by painting over the highlights in white gouache. You can see the result at the top of this post. The rescue was successful. Jimmy’s up for sale, with the price to be found here.