Joe Bugner

After a long five day break I’m back in the studio again. I felt in the mood for crystalline watercolours and had already identified a photo of the late Joe Bugner that might make a good portrait, although I’d not decided on a medium for it until today.

I started by following my usual process for crystalline watercolours, identifying the lights, mediums and darks and getting these down in paper. Then I masked out the lights , sprinkled crystals over the darks and painted over them with a wet brush and smoothed over the background with vertical strikes with screwed up kitchen paper. The background was looking a little too green for my liking, so I sprinkled over some reds and wet them. The background turned to blood, so I dabbed off as much red as I could, then experimented with the addition of blues, yellows and oranges, smoothing all the time with kitchen paper, until I got to something acceptable.

The next stage is to sprinkle crystals over the midtones, spry on water and dab everything off with kitchen paper. I did this but thought that my midtones were looking too yellow/green. So I tried adding a second layer of blues reds and darker greens.

Once I’d let things dry and removed the making fluid, it was clear to me that my midtones were now too dark, not that distinguishable from the darks. So I sprinkled some dark grey crystals on some scrap paper, dipped in a wet brush and painted over all the darks in the face in an effort to bring out a likeness. I left the background alone but added more darks to the boxing gloves, trying to bring out some three dimensionality and, in the case of the one on Joe’s right hand, to show a bit of detail, turning it from a ball into a rolled over fist. And that was me done.

This one feels a bit short of my best. It’s those middle tones being too dark, especially on Joes’s face where it looks like he’s wearing a helmet, which he wasn’t in my source photo. On the other hand, the right glove now looks three dimensional, the back wall authentic, the t-shirt crinkled and Joe focused. This one’s going up for sale, with the price to be found here.