John Lydon

People might think it’s weird that I’m painting John after looking through other musical artists I’ve painted and wonder whether he fits with my tastes in music.  Well, let me tell you.  I got the the one proper Sex Pistols studio album (Never Mind…) for my birthday and it’s honestly amazing.  Time’s a great healer and this music that would have been quite shocking back in 1977 sounds fresh as homemade bread today.

Anyway, first step in this one was to put down an outline using a grid, and then to put on a bit of masking fluid.  Today I only masked out the highlight on the ear, the earring a couple of highlights in the pupils and a highlight on some sort of pimple under John’s right eye.  I didn’t do any spattering today as I feel as if I’ve been using too much masking fluid lately.

Than the painting.  It was a two step process but with a little bit of extra fiddling after each step.  The first step was to paint in all the dark and mid tones with random colours.  I used viridian, burnt sienna, Indian yellow, French ultramarine and quinacridone magenta.  With five well spaced colours featuring heavily, this painting can’t be classified under a colour key.  After the colours were down, I did do some fiddling, adding a second layer in places where I wanted to distinguish between dark to mid and light to mid tones.  And in some places I could see medium tones that I’d missed and added these in.

Then the second stage was to layer over the darks.  I put aside the yellows red and green and just mixed the French ultramarine and burnt sienna into “that grey”, veering slightly towards blue to keep it cool.  And I put this all over the darkest areas.

And then I fiddled a bit, colouring in the shirt to help it stand out, putting in some darker hair shapes and adding the odd dark here and there in the face as I “looked for a likeness”.  The whole looking for a likeness thing is making more sense to me with every portrait.  And, after removing masking fluid and deciding that the white shapes in the ear and earring were fine, that was me done.

And this, my friends, is a second successive amazing painting.  Likeness tick.  Attitude tick.  Colours tick.   The colours in the darks on the side of John’s head, on his neck and on his shirt are just so interesting; even without the multicoloured background the colours in the dates would make this one much more interesting than a painting with monotone darks.  Suffice to say, this one’s going up for sale.