And here they are, all together. Spock, Kirk and Scotty. None of them brilliant individual…
First Officer Spock
I know I said I might not end up completing the Corbomite Manouver Collection but after putting Kirk and Scotty alongside each other I could see how they complemented each other and how the combination was stronger than the sum of its parts. So I cracked on today with the third and final painting in the collection. Because this painting was to be created using the tundra supergranulators, I wanted to paint somebody in a blue shirt and picked Spock. I thought he’d be easier to paint than the wrinkly Doctor McCoy and I had a great source photo of Spock with dark facial planes and bright highlights.
So I started with a pencil outline, using a grid. I found that I didn’t need to do as much measuring of positions of landmark points within squares as I usually do: many of the features seemed to lie on the edges lf squares or slap bang in the middle. I spattered on some masking fluid stars, reserved some directional highlights in the hair and some seriously big highlights on the face and ear. One thing I forgot to do today, though, was to remove any spatters from the face and shirt before starting to paint after the masking fluid had dried, so there’s the odd rogue star in there.
I started painting with all the detailed darks to give me something off which to hang everything else. So that’s the line between the lips, the nostril, the irises, shadows along the top of the eyes, eyebrows and shadowy bits in the ears. All of these were painted in with tundra violet, the darkest colour in the set. I didn’t paint the sky, hair or collar at this stage, despite the plan being for these to also be dark.
Next I moved on to the face and added in all the mid tones with Tundra pink, green and orange, variegating between colours while trying to keep the cheeks pink and to include impressionistic greens, pinks and oranges wherever I could see them in the source photo. Once these were down, I added in some tundra blue to create mid to dark tones wherever they were needed.
This shirt is mainly tundra blue with creases added in the green and violet in places. I ended up adding this layer twice.
And then there’s the sky, the hair and the black collar. Most of this is tundra violet but there’s the odd bit of pink, blue, green or orange that’s been dropped in. I found the violet wasn’t as dark as I was hoping for so I went over everything with a second layer of the same colours but with the violet very dry, almost direct from the tube. I’d normally not separate the hair from the sky here, as both are dark, but today I thought I’d make the hair just that tiny bit darker to make it stand out and to distinguish Spock from Scotty. And, as you can see, I added some salt to the sky.
As usual, I kept coming back to the face, tinkering around looking for a likeness. I don’t think that tinkering with watercolour portraits is as bad as tinkering with watercolour landscapes. In fact it’s almost essential. And after letting it all dry, removing the masking fluid and hoovering up all the crumbs, that was me done.
I guess this one’s not too bad. Just like with the other two in the collection, the likeness isn’t quite there but it’s clear who it is and there’s some personality coming through. The supergranulators are creating some great effects on Spock’s cheek, chin and neck – probably the best supergranulation effects in this collection.
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