It's my birthday and the front page headline on stash news is that I’m going…
El Bandito
Today’s painting started off from a reference photo of Lee Van Cleef in The Good, The Bad And The Ugly but I never could get any sort of likeness to emerge. On the other hand, someone with a bit of personality did emerge eventually, even if he was only some generic Mexican bandit.
The thing I enjoy most about oil pastels is that I can keep tinkering as long as I like and it doesn’t destroy the painting like it does with watercolour. And I did a lot of tinkering in this one. It was the tache and the mouth that caused me most problems and kept me coming back, although there may also have been a problem with the skin tones keeping darkening every time I messed with the tache, leaving me needing to apply more white to tidy it up. One thing I didn’t have any problems with, though, was the nose: every time I reapplied pastel to it, it kept its 3D form.
Overall, I rate this as a slight failure and not worth putting up for sale. The eyes are a bit skewy and I can’t bring myself to forget that this was supposed to be LVK.
Going forward, this is my last oil pastel in the A5-ish size. I’m now moving on to A4-ish, which will make details less fiddly and hopefully mean I produce better work. In other news I’m starting to wonder whether I need a second set of oil pastels so I can use one set for landscapes and another for portraits. Hmmm….
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