And here they are, all together. As I expected, their positives as a set are…
Il Cattivo
Number two in my The Good, The Bad And The Ugly collection is Angel Eyes, the bad one, played by Lee Van Cleef. In allocating supergranulating sets over the three protagonists, Angel Eyes was always going to get the chilly tundra colours.
I stuck to same methodology for this one, which was to:
– get a pencil drawing down using a grid
– mask out key highlights, this time on the gun, the stitches, the buckles, the bullets and the finger nails
– spatter some masking fluid into the background
– protect the edges of the upper and lower gutter areas with masking tape
– add all the colours, starting with the interesting shapes (hand and gun) but otherwise in a fairly random order, not just back to front
– add multiple layers to the darkest areas
– add some salt to the background
– once the main painting is finished, mask out camera film–like holes along the edges of the gutters and mask out the Italian caption
– add load of random colours to the margins and throw on some salt
– once everything’s dry, remove the masking fluid and we’re done
Colour–wise, I pretty well stuck to the five tundra colours. The only place where I needed some extra help was with the bullets, where I dropped in a tiny, tiny bit of cadmium yellow. And for the gutters, I started with the tundra violet, pink, blue and orange, taking the view that two green–free gutters were required to balance all the greens in the background and on Angel Eyes’ coat. After watching the result start to dry, though I did make a couple of changes, adding some green but also lots of tundra violet along the edges next to the main painting just to rack up the violets enough to create a green/violet dichotomy on the page.
And, yes, I like this one. The tundra colours create a chilly mood, the green/purple clash works well, the highlights are good again, the supergranulators are granulating everywhere. There’s so much to like about this one. And there’s something else I’ve just noticed. In Marvel Comics in the1960s, superheroes tended to be dressed in red, blue and maybe yellow, whereas villains would be dressed in green and purple. And that green and purple colour scheme must be engrained in my psyche because those colours just spell evil and they’re screaming out of this one.
This one’s up for sale but only as as part of a set.
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