John Henry Holliday

Yeah, June is taking a while to get started and I’ve gone for another easy option. It’s a posterised portrait and, not only that, I’ve pretty well repeated the exact process that I followed for Billy The Kid. These desert supergranulators are just great for paintings of really old photos. Today’s model is Doc Holliday. He was always going to have his portrait done here after I painted his three teammates from the gunfight at the OK Corral. They make up a famous foursome.

Anyway, just copying and pasting from the Billy The Kid post, I marked out a white rectangle with masking tape, gridded it up and put down pencil outlines. Then it was masking fluid down over the white areas, desert yellow and desert orange everywhere else within the rectangle. Then desert brown in the medium and dark areas and desert grey and desert green in the darks. I put in a few random water drops and stubs of dry colour in a tempt to get the supergranulators to misbehave. And around the outside I just wet everything and then dropped in all five desert supergranulators randomly. And after removing the masking tape and fluid, that was me done.

I’m happy with the final outcome of this one, even if I slightly prefer Billy. There’s a lot of the darkest dark in the photo that isn’t in the abstract background behind it: that’s my only reason. But, still, a successful day today.