Today's painting is a portrait of Joe Walsh of The Eagles, someone who in his…
Fleabag
A lot of my recent watercolour portraits seem to have been painted from a distance, including bodies, hands and things like that. I wanted to go back to basics today and concentrate on the face. So I picked a photo of Phoebe Waller–Bridge that looked like it might still be interesting after being cropped. I particularly liked how the eyes and mouth stood out so much that it seemed there was nothing else in the face. With the face being quite simple, I thought I’d make this one a triple portrait.
I’ve gone for three layer notan portraits using my traffic light colour schemes, as I’ve been using the supergranulators a bit too often recently. So so the three layers are:
– on the left, transparent yellow, cerulean blue and French ultramarine
– in the middle, transparent yellow, Winsor red and French ultramarine
– on the right, rose dore, Winsor red and French ultramarine
I also spattered the second and third layer colours in the otherwise empty bottom left corner.
I guess the one thing I did differently to normal was that I didn’t reserve all the white areas. I reserved tiny white highlights in the eyes in all three portraits and all the big white areas on the left with masking fluid. But for the other two portraits I didn’t reserve the big white shapes, instead just being careful to leave them empty when painting on the first layer of colour. For the one in the right I even wet the areas I wanted to painting rose dore before adding the paint: this gave my white shapes soft edges.
I have a friend who I think looks a bit like Fleabag. After the first two layers were down, this was looking more like her than like the true subject but the third layer did help bring things back. The final version has a little bit of my friend still there but is mainly Fleabag. I’m calling this one Fleabag rather than Phoebe Waller–Bridge because, well, that’s who I’ve painted. Anyway, this one feels like a winner and it’s going up for sale.
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