Great Gig In The Sky: David Gilmour

I was watching a bit of YouTube over breakfast this week and came across a review of Great Gig In The Sky from the Pink Floyd Pulse concert and it gave me four ideas for paintings. I want to paint portraits of all three female vocalists on this track but I’m starting with David Gilmour on the pedal steel guitar, a weird instrument that sits in front of you on your lap or on a tabletop. There were some shots of David in the video with a thin line of highlights down the front of his face that I knew straight away would make a great subject for a posterised painting. And with lots of blue and pink lighting around him, I had to use the tundra supergranulators.

I deviated a bit from my usual process, so I’ll go through everything I did:

• I used the Notanizer app to identify the highlights, marked these out on the paper and reserved them with masking fluid. I also spattered on a starry background.
• Once the masking fluid was dry (and I’d removed any rogue starry spatters from David’s face and body) I painted over everything with tundra pink. I tried adding tundra green and tundra orange in places but things started looking too muddy, so I drowned out those colours with more of the pink. There were some tiny hints of the green and orange in places but I was fine with that.
• When that first layer was dry, I put on a second layer using tundra blue. This was all done by eye, constantly referring to my source photo, without using the Notanizer app.
• The second layer wasn’t contrasting as much as I wanted with the first, pink layer, so I added tundra violet, wet into wet, in the darkest areas. This third colour gave me the freedom to add more of the blue over the pink in places to make things more interesting. So I did this, most notably in the background behind David’s head, creating a bigger contrast between the highlight on his neck and the background.
• Once this was all dry, I rubbed off the masking fluid and evaluated my work. I decided that the wet into wet tundra violet wasn’t dark enough and was too fuzzy in the ear, so added another layer of the violet in the ear, down the face and over David’s top. I also mixed up some very watery tundra pink and added this to the front of the face in places and to some bits of the neck and back of head highlights that I thought needed darkening. And that was me done.

I’m happy with this one. It’s streets ahead of my earlier effort and worthy of standing alongside Roger Waters: I wasn’t happy living in a world where I’d only done justice to one of these two guys. As I was hoping, the white highlight down the front of David’s face is the star of the show, doing most of the heavy lifting. But everything else has a role to play. The darks add a huge sense of mystery to the painting and the abstract nature of it brings in some trippy Pink Floyd texture. The likeness is probably falling a bit short but there’s so much mood and atmosphere in this one that I’m thinking so what. This one’s up for sale, with the price to be found here.