Ding Liren

And next up is world number 3, Ding Liren.  He’s not doing too well at the candidates with just 2.5/7 at the point the tournament was paused.  I think his preparation suffered when he was put in quarantine after heading from China into Russia.  Anyway, this is an art blog, not a chess blog, so that’s enough of that.

How’s this portrait?  Well the likeness still isn’t there (is it ever?).  In reality, Ding looks very fragile, as if he could get blown away by the wind.  I’ve not captured that at all – this guy looks much tougher physically.  The best bit about this picture is the eyes – I was really careful drawing the irises so that it was clear they were looking upwards at the guy opposite.  And, just like with Grischuk’s spotlight, I added some background to bring out some personality – this time it’s that yellow band, which draws attention to the Ding stare.

I’m thinking ahead to how this fits into the final set of portraits.  This one was in landscape format (just in case I can find a six portrait, two landscape, eight aperture frame).  The background is a bit like the Grischuk one, so I now have two like that, two plain white and one black.  And the black delineation was done using a rollerball rather than a marker, adding a bit of variety – I must do this at least once more, maybe two or three times.

Finally, I’m starting to think that when my dark blue marker runs out I need to replace it with another dark blue but one that’s not so powerful.  I’m finding this one just too dominant when laid over other colours.  It would be good to do these blue jackets in dark blue and dark grey (or even black) but I just can’t lay the two colours on top of each other.