B. B. King

Today’s portrait is another guitarist, the late B. B. King.  I did get to see B. B. in concert a few years ago at the Albert Hall.  From memory I think he was just a few months short of his 86th birthday!  Derek Trucks and Susan Tedeschi joined him for the middle third of the concert and stayed around for the final third when they were also joined by Ronnie Wood, Slash and Mick Hucknall!  That was some evening.  The concert was recorded and I have it on CD and DVD.

As usual, I started by putting down outlines using a grid.  I’d been looking at the source photo yesterday evening and deciding there were lots of greens in there, so I started by putting in the darkest shapes with sap green, and then I just let the pastels do their thing.  I introduced more greens, plus some reds, blues, yellows and some colours that were more fleshy. Oh, and some whites for highlights. I kept going with these colours for a while, refining the likeness  but being aware that at some point it would no longer be possible to add more colour to the paper.  At one point I had something that looked great but with lots of red in the forehead and green in the cheeks when theory suggested they should be the other way round, so I corrected this.  Eventually I decided that it was too risky to continue working on the face and hands, so stopped.

After the face and hands were done , I worked on the guitar, the shirt and the background.  The background started by being shaded in with the side of a black pastel.  It wasn’t quite dark enough but instead of adding more black, I dotted in blues, reds, greens and maybe some dark browns and smoothed them all together with a finger.  It looks good now.  I didn’t really have a plan for the shirt and decided on the spur of the moment to have a go at something patterned similarly to the actual shirt rather than taking the easy option and going for a plain shirt.  And that worked too.  I just had to be careful when pushing the colour into the paper with my fingers not to ruin everything by spreading the blue and yellow together.

Finally, I added more colour to B.B.’s hair and scratched out some facial hair with a scalpel.  And that was me done.

And I’m so happy with this one.  It’s unmistakably B.B. in my eyes, although some might claim to see a bit of Nelson Mandela, Don Warrington or Peter Reid in there.  I think it was the ‘tache at the end that finally won it for B.B.  but it’s not just about the likeness.  I find this painting is generating an emotional response within me.  The closed eyes somehow make me feel the note that he’s squeezing out of the guitar and the hair and ‘tache show off his old age and remind me of how recently we lost a legend.  This one’s a huge success in my opinion and is up for sale.