Oil pastel paintings are (for me, for now) faster than watercolours, so are the ideal…
John Lydon In Oil Pastel
It was a tough call over who to paint today. ChatGPT wasn’t able to come up with any celebrities I’d ever heard of whose birthday it was today. Eventually I thought I’d asking for a random British celebrity born on 20 January. It came up with (and I shit you not) “comedian and actor Gary Barlow”. I did come up with an interesting idea for a water portrait of Gary but decided at the last minute that I needed to do something with oil pastels, so saved Gary for a other day and decided to paint John Lydon. It’s not his birthday but I quite fancied painting him in oil pastels.
For the pose I picked the same pose as I’d already used for a watercolour as it had good light and dark areas. And I just enjoyed myself for about three hours. I started with a pencil sketch using a grid and painted in the eyes, nostrils and mouth line first to give me something to hang everything else off. I was really pleased with the eyes: they made the painting look human right from the beginning.
You’re probably wondering why I told the Gary Barlow story at the beginning. It’s because as I progressed through the painting it kept wanting to look like Gary nd I would have to keep dragging it back towards John. A very weird experience.
Once I was happy with about 95% of the painting, I looked really closely at it and at the source photo for small ways to improve the likeness. The three most serious changes I made were to raise John’s right eyebrow a bit, lower the left eyebrow, move the irises in his eyeballs slightly to our left (undoing some of the great work on the eyes from earlier) and moving the contour down the left of John’s face inwards in some places and outwards in others. And that was me done.
Looking at the final result, I’ve ended up with John and not Gary, which is good. My colours are impressionistic but a bit more realistic than in some of my other portraits (and I’m not talking about the three layer portraits here). Despite using the same source photo, I’ve picked out a different side of John to before, showing some of the ravages of old age and less of the cynicism of middle age. I like this one. John’s up for sale.
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