Duane Allman

I thought I’d try using the Artgraf colours to do a portrait.  After reading the William Maughan book, my painted portraits (including most of my marker and coloured pencil portraits) are very much based on chiariscuro paintings, so all about dark and light areas, with maybe midtones sometimes.  I looked at the swatches I’d done of artfraf colours and decided that blue and sanguine would make an interesting dark tone and blue and ochre an interesting mid tone.  Sounds like a plan.

So, you know what’s coming next.  I divided the paper and my source photo into grids and accurately plotted lots of important points of the face on the paper.  Then, once I thought I had enough points down, I connected them up.  And in my resulting drawing, I was only interested in dividing the paper into dark, light and mid tone areas.  If the edge of the face was dark and the background behind it was dark, I didn’t bother marking in the edge of the face.  No need.  Finally, before starting with the colour, I tried masking out a few hairs by drawing them on with a candle.  It’s something I’ve been meaning to try with watercolours but I’m not sure it works with artgrafs.

Then it was on to colour.  I picked up the Artgraf blocks and used them to colour the painting in.  First blue in the dark areas, then ochre in the midtone areas.  And because sanguine was in both of my planned mixtures, I coloured sanguine over the top of both.  I did a little bit of fiddling on top of this, adding a little bit of yellow in a couple of places in the hair and magenta in the background on the left.  Oh and some more ochre wherever darks were right next to lights and I wanted a smoother transition.

This is what the painting looked like at this stage:

Impossible to see how it’s going to turn out, right?

And then we get to the fun bit, the wetting.  Well, it’s the fun bit with inktense pencils but with the Artgrafs I’m still experimenting.  I’ve tried just wetting everything but the dark colours just take over.  I’ve tried reserving blank stripes with masking tape.  And I’ve tried wetting mosaic style with small strokes and regular brush cleaning.  Today I thought I’d start by spraying the paper and, only after that, deciding in which direction to head.  So I sprayed the paper and this is what I got:

I thought this was amazing in a Roy Lichtenstein way.  Just look at it!  The only reason I didn’t stop here was that the shape on Duane’s right cheek was too hard edged.  It needed some brushwork and if it was to harmonise with the rest of the painting, I’d need brushwork everywhere.  But you can be sure I will do a painting at some point where I spray and stop.

So I got some wet brushes and went around wetting my marks properly, looking mainly to get a hard edge down Duane’s left cheek and to soften edges in a number of places.  As I went around the painting, I found it was more colourful than the three tone painting I’d planned, with the odd bit of blue, red, green and yellow showing through.  All in a good way.

For some final tinkering in the wetting stage, I lifted off some colour in places with kitchen paper and added some more sanguine colour in a couple of places to keep things balanced.  And that was me done.

And the final result is pretty good.  It looks like Duane, but maybe with a bit of Clapton in the hair.  It’s come out a lot more colourful than I’d planned but that’s not a big deal.  And the big plus from this one is that, if I can get the dry marks right, I’ve discovered that wetting by spraying is worth exploring further.  Duane’s up for sale.