Doctor Zachary Smith

Sometimes I receive messages and I just have to act on them. I had the telly to myself last night and managed to find a 1960 episode of The Twilight Zone. A great find! And this episode featured Jonathan Harris playing a doctor. And this happened just days after a Mr Smith that I know announced that he’d submitted his PhD thesis. It was too much of a coincidence. I just had to paint Doctor Smith, played by Jonathan Harris in Lost In Space.

Lost In Space is an old and clunky TV series and it was my favourite program back in my early primary school years. Doctor Smith was a really popular character with all us kids despite him being cowardly and utterly evil. In the pilot episode (which I never saw as a kid but have seen since) he’s an enemy agent who attempts to sabbotage the Robinson family’s flight into space but somehow screws up and ends up as an extra passenger when the launch goes through. Somehow, for whatever reason, the Robinsons accept him as an extra family member rather than throwing him in an airlock and lunching him into empty space. And then we get an exciting new adventure every week when Doctor Smith will do things like trying (and failing) to sell the Robinson kids to alien slavers in return for a taxi ride back to Earth. And despite all this, every episode ends happily with him accepted back into the family. Absolutely bonkers. How was such an evil this character ever popular?

Anyway, I decided that I’d be painting Doctor Smith in posterised style. I wanted to use my conventional palette rather than the supergranulators as the supergranulators felt a bit too modern for the 1960s. The red, amber and green posterised colour schemes all felt a bit too bright. I had to go for the blue scheme: it was the closest I could get to an evil mood setter.

We’ve got some interim steps today as a special treat. First I put down a pencil outline, then reserved the whites with masking fluid. I also spattered in some masking fluid for a starry background, befitting Doctor Smith’s zone of operations:

Then I put down cerulean blue in all the light, medium and dark areas. Everywhere except for the white areas.

Then French ultramarine in the medium and dark areas:

And quinacridone magenta over the dark areas:

And, after removing all the masking fluid, that was me almost done. I added a little more cerulean blue in his left eye in places, a tiny bit on the nose and along the bottom of his turtle neck, but that was all.

I’m happy with how this one turned out. I especially like the weird stuff going on above his shoulders, especially his left shoulder. I put him up for sale and he sold within hours.