John Paul Jones

And here he is at last, John Paul Jones.  The only bassist to have ever given me any trouble (Geddy Lee, Jimbo and Roy are three of my greatest ever portraits).

But John Paul Jones has been a right bugger.  I started trying to draw an older, more mature, JPJ.  He should have been easy with some strong facial lines, a pouting bottom lip and eyes that always seemed to be closed.  But here’s what I ended up with in my first two attempts:

I should point out that the first of these was drawn before Robert Plant, when I still had some flexibility in choice of background colour and was not committed to blue.  Neither drawing is a remote likeness of JPJ, so I took this as a message from the gods that I needed to give up on the mature version and draw a younger version.

I also adopted a different strategy for the younger version, starting with the big shadow shape on one side of his face and extending this out into his hair and onto the jumper.  It was my way of steering away from going straight for the facial features.

It all ended up kind of working.  I like the tilt to the head, the spaced out look and the contrast between thick edged shapes and the thin black lines of the jumper pattern and the guitar strings.  I don’t like that there’s not much energy and expression in his left hand, something that’s normally a personal strength in drawings like this.  Likeness-wise, I think it’s OK, although there’s some Noel Fielding and Jeff Beck floating around in there too.

But the real test will be how well the whole Led Zep collection fits together.