Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid

And here’s today’s second painting.  This one really is a Western.  For once it’s an action scene rather than a pose.  I’m going to claim that I’ve done two action paintings today because Thursday night’s BBC Celebrity Painting Challenge is going to be all about action paintings.  Believe me if you want to.

The three primaries in the figures are French ultramarine, light red and Indian yellow.  The choice of red and yellow were based on the orange feel of the background and my aim of limiting myself to one yellow and one red throughout the painting for consistency.  The background used those three primaries plus raw sienna (which I don’t count as a yellow), burnt sienna, burnt umber and a bit (only a tiny bit) of quinacridone magenta in the barrel rings.  There’s also some titanium white spattered on the end to look like a shower of bullets – this is from the scene where Butch and Sundance are faced with loads of gunmen and go down fighting.

After seeing what worked and didn’t work in Invasion! I was feeling ambitious.  I thought I’d try using blue in the shadowiest places and yellow in the brightest.  I thought that, with this new approach, Payne’s grey wouldn’t be needed around the outlines of the figures.  And I thought I’d use some masking fluid on the guns so that I could paint them in afterwards in yellow.  This painting wasn’t a handle turning exercise, applying old techniques to a new subject.  It was an experiment with new techniques.

And I can’t believe how well it turned out.  The background (which I was half expecting to let the painting down) was OK, with its pillars, steps, barrels, windows and all.  But the figures!  They actually look like Hazel Soan figures!  I’m amazed.  This one is a big step towards becoming a better artist.  I was finding that the light red didn’t mix brilliantly with the yellow and blue next to it, but that didn’t cause any problems.  And there’s the complimentary pairing of blue and orange against each other in so many places – not something I thought of beforehand but, in retrospect a touch of genius.

This one is up for sale.