I Don’t Live Today

Mondays are always busy for me and I wasn’t planning on doing a painting. But with three days of chess coming up, I thought I should prepare something that I could finish on one of those days without needing to keep referring to a source photo on the iPad. So I looked through my photos and found one of Jimi Hendrix that would work well as a two value painting. I thought about painting the darks using a wet into wet wash of French ultramarine and burnt sienna but decided that a grey colour scheme wouldn’t be appropriate for Jimi. So I decided to go for a patchwork portrait, masking out the highlights and painting an 8×5 grid colour swatch over the top.

I managed to get the Grid# app on my iPad to come up with a 5×8 grid of rectangles to go with my two value plan from the Notanizer app. So I gridded up the paper and marked in all the highlights I wanted to reserve.

The plan was to stop there but I decided to carry on and earn myself a relaxing day tomorrow watching the chess. So I masked out all the highlights. Then I also masked out, very roughly, the grid of boundaries around my rectangles. Once that was dry, I filled out the 40 rectangles with all of the colours in my three palettes except for the MGraham burnt umber. One of my 41 colours had to miss out so I went for the one that I have two very similar versions of. There are two cerulean blue rectangles in there but MGraham’s and Winsor & Newton’s cerulean blues are based on different pigments, so I’m happy to give them both a place. In filling out the rectangles, I tried not to fill them right up to the masked out edges except for wherever there were negative, masked out shapes touching the edges. When the watercolours were dry, I removed the making fluid and rubbed out any visible pencil lines. And that was me done.

And the final result? It’s interesting. Interesting in that it’s not immediately obvious that this is a Hendrix portrait. On the other hand, when I turned off the lights in the studio tonight, I caught a monotone version of the painting in the corner of my eye and Jimi was coming through just fine. Weird. Anyway, Jimi’s up for sale, with the price to be found here. And I’ve named this one after one of the tracks from Hendrix In The West, the album that features my source photo on the back.