Freddie Mercury

Right.  That’s enough of the Inktense pencils.  I need to get back to watercolour portraits to impress any passing Portrait Of The Year Judges.  I thought I’d have a crack at Freddie Mercury today – he’s been waiting patiently for a while now.  Colour-wise, having used my red triad for Amy Winehouse, my amber triad for Jimi Hendrix and my blue triad for Warren Haynes, I thought my green triad deserved the chance of a full size portrait.  So this one has transparent yellow as a first layer, cerulean blue as a second and French ultramarine as a third.

At the beginning when I was reserving the whites with masking fluid, I also spattered over some masking fluid for a starry background.  Later on, with both of the blue layers, I tried to stimulate some granulation by charging dry colour into areas that were already wet.  And I did a little bit of dabbing with kitchen paper on the final layer to create even more texture.  There was a bit of fiddling at the end, painting in some second or third layer shapes that I’d missed and tinkering around looking for a likeness.  In particular I tried to bring out Freddie’s hair with some very dry French ultramarine rather than just leaving it to merge with the background.  And that was me done.

While I remember, grids are great for getting the outlines down, especially when I also do loads of measuring.  I’m convinced I could never have done this freehand after discovering that the bottom of Freddie’s nose is barely a quarter of the way down his face!  Measure, measure, measure!

Anyway, the final result is OK.  Definitely Freddie and there’s the power there in the pose that I was hoping to be able to recreate but the mouth and his left hand are both a bit messy.  And with so much of the yellow in the first layer showing, he has a bit of a Homer Simpson vibe going on.  It’s something for me to watch out for in future if doing a three layer portrait based on a source photo that has a lot of light tone (one layer of colour, not the not white highlights with no colour) in the skin.  On the other hand I think the green background’s great.  The variety and texture is probably down to the second and third colours both being big time granulators.  Freddie’s up for sale.

<Edit: someone on LinkedIn pointed out that Freddie’s neck looks too wide.  I agree – it’s obvious now it’s been pointed out.  But if I changed it by laying on more blue the alteration would stick out a mile, so I’m leaving this as it is.>