Ben Askins, The Working Week

I’m in the the mood for another collection of marker portraits, so let’s go. This is going to be a set of portraits of another six YouTube creators, following on from The (original) YouTube Six. Just like with the original lineup, this is intended as a tribute to the tireless work of these individuals and the joy and entertainment that they bring to everybody.

The original set was a well balanced lineup, covering my six passions of chess, food, maths, music, painting and physics. This set won’t be quite so balanced, with three of those ares unrepresented, one appearing twice and two portraits in this collection not belonging under any of those six headings.

First up is Ben Askins, creator of The Working Week Show blog, where he gets to criticise terrible management practices and occasionally praise great ones. It’s a great YouTube channel. He’s also written this book – as an Amazon Associate I earn commission from qualifying purchases but this costs absolutely nothing extra to you.

I created a three value plan for Ben using the Notanizer app, put the plan down on paper and filled it out with black and with “cool grey 4”. He’s come out OK, even if you have to screw up your eyes a bit to get the best out of him.

I’m stopping here for the day but will be back to work again tomorrow. I need to have a think overnight about what my colour scheme plan is for this collection. It might sound weird that I’ve already done one portrait without a plan but there are three possible schemes that this could fit into:

• one where all six portraits are in black and cool grey 4 (boring but tempting)
• one (like in the Enterprise Crew collection) where I use black as the dark in every portrait but vary the midtone colours
• one where I use different darks and midtones in each one but where the midtone colour is a lighter variation of the dark colour (a three value, two colour version of the four value, three colour scheme used for the Dragons Den collection)

<A couple of days later I went over all the black a second time with swirly stroks. This looks much better now, with a farke4 black and no stripy streaks.>