Billy The Kid

I felt like doing a portrait today. I’ve been doing a lot of landscapes in an attempt to impress LAOTY judges (newsflash: I’ve not made it to a pod but I’ll be applying to be a wildcard) but somehow I find myself preferring portraits and finding them more relaxing. And with not much time to spend painting this afternoon (I’ve been watching a lot of Master Game videos on YouTube) I went for a simple posterised portrait: they never seem to take long. A posterised portrait might also give me the confidence boost that I found myself needing. As a subject I’ve gone for Billy The Kid, based on a portrait of the real Kid, not on one of an actor.

This painting went down a tried and tested route. I marked out a white rectangle with masking tape, gridded it up and put down pencil outlines. Then it was masking fluid down over the white areas, desert yellow and desert orange everywhere else within the rectangle. Then desert brown in the medium and dark areas and desert grey and desert green in the darks. I put in a few random water drops and stabs of dry colour in a tempt to get the supergranulators to misbehave. And around the outside I just wet everything and then dropped in all five desert supergranulators randomly. And after removing the masking tape and fluid, that was me done. I’ve talked that through really quickly because I don’t want to spend longer writing this one up than I did painting it.

And you know what? My confidence is back because I think this one’s great. I’m especially pleased that in putting down the outlines I used the grid but didn’t take the extra step of using a ruler to pinpoint exactly where everything should go. Like all my posterised paintings, this looks like a photo from a distance. He wasn’t what you’d call a looker but I’ve caught him so well I’m thinking of changing my name to Pat Garrett. Billy’s up for sale.