Great Gig In The Sky: Sam Brown

I’m still on Great Gig In The Sky from the Pink Floyd Pulse concert. Today it’s the first of the three female vocalists on that track, Sam Brown. This one was done in coloured pencil and has taken me a couple of days.

I started by putting down a pencil outline and by remembering (for once) to plough in some lines with that metal tool with that tool with a tiny ball on the end. In particular, I put in lots of stray hairs, some of them across Sam’s face, and plenty of texture in the microphone head.

The background has multiple layers of colour as usual. It was meant to be a neutral colour with hints of red in places but has ended up looking very red. Oh well.

The microphone came out closer to what was intended. I started very literal with blues and greys but then created neutral tones by laying down multiple layers of reds, blues and greens.

For Sam’s face, I started by blocking in shadows with greys. I then added loads of layers of colour. Some of these were reds/blues/greens on top of each other to create darks, some were colours I could see in the source photo, some were neutral greys/browns, some were crazy colours just for the sake of it and some were flesh tones to bring the portrait back down to Earth. I was careful to leave highlights on the forehead, the nose, the cheekbone and the bottom lip.

For the hair it would have been so easy to just go in with yellow. But no. Whenever I used a colour in the face, I’d use that same colour to put in some wavy hair marks. I added some darks in places by layering up blues/reds/greens. Only at the end did I introduce some yellows and, even then, made sure it didn’t overpower the other colours.

As a final step, I smoothed out Sam and the microphone with a paper stump and then painted coloured pencil blender over the red background. I though this might bring Sam and the microphone forward. But it didn’t. Everything looked wrong. So I also painted over Sam and the microphone with the blender. And that was me done.

The final result is OK I guess. The hair is great- who knew you could create blonde hair with so many colours? There’s some passion there but not as much as there was for Sinead O’Connor. And the likeness falls a bit short, the microphone looks clunky to me and the background looks smeary. Still, it’s up for sale, with the price to be found here.