Bob Weir

July has been too hot for painting. I’ve made it home from my morning walks and not had the energy to do anything other than read a book. From 1st to 14th July I’d only done three paintings! But today the weather’s cooler and there’s been some rain, so I was feeling under pressure to get back to work.

I went for a three layer posterised portrait today. The subject is Bob Weir of the Grateful Dead, someone I didn’t make a great job of in coloured pencil a while back. Colour-wise I went for the Shire supergranulators, fast becoming my favourites for portraits of anyone not from Scotland or the Wild West. The value plan for this one was relatively simple by my standards, with lots of big shapes and not much detail, so quite a gentle way back in.

I followed my usual process for paintings like this, except that I included some masking fluid spatters at the start and threw in some salt at the end. In both cases, this was with the intention of livening up what might otherwise have been quite a boring dark background.

After removing the masking fluid, I did more tinkering than normal. There was a big highlight under Bob’s nose that I’d not masked out that I had to paint over in white gouache. I added an extra white mark along the top of the highlight on his right cheek. And I wet and dabbed off some grey paint in several places before adding more grey to get the edges of the darks back in the right place. And that was me done.

This one has come out a lot better than I was expecting for such a simple portrait while being short of match practice. The likeness is there: the gaze in the right eye is bang on and, at least in my opinion, captures Bob’s soul perfectly. And the simplicity of the composition gives it all a semi-abstract quality. Bob’s up for sale, with the price to be found here.

I’m not sure about the next few days but the weather’s looking good for painting on Saturday, Sunday and Monday. Fingers crossed.