It's my birthday and the front page headline on stash news is that I’m going…
Jos Buttler
Look, I’m still in the mood for cricket portraits and with England due to play Pakistan in the World T20 Final on Sunday morning, I thought I’d have a go at drawing our captain, Jos Buttler, arguably the greatest limited overs cricketer of all time. I went for oil pastels as my medium as I quite enjoyed sculpting Ian Botham’s face while wetting the inktense pencils the other day and oil pastels are the other medium that I can sculpt.
It took me a while but I finally found a photo of Jos where he wasn’t grinning his head off. The other thing I liked about my source photo was how his chin stick out defiantly as a result of the camera being quite low down. If this were in a comic, the angle of this one would definitely remind me of Gil Kane’s artwork.
Anyway, the pencil drawing went down first, again drawn upside down using a grid. This method gets me as close to a likeness as I’m ever going to get.
To fill it all in, I start with the eyes, mouth, ears and nostrils. These are the most important areas, so I take my time over them and even add careful lines using the edges of the pastels. If you can get the gaze, that’s 95% of the important stuff done.
After that, the rest is coloured in much more loosely, with lots of dots from stabbing the paper repeatedly with the pastels. I put in all the impressionistic colours I can see in the source photo, and whites in the well lit areas, then follow the rules by dotting in goldish yellow in the forehead, red in the cheeks and blues and greens in the lower face. Finally, I look at the mess I’m left with and add in more conventional fleshy colours like white, pinks and earthy colours. At this stage, every point on the face should have at least three colours on or very close to it. And then I have fun sculpting the face with my index finger, mixing the colours as I do so. Once the face is done, there’s always some further work to be done on it. Either correcting some shapes or correcting some colours – just like with inktense pencils I’m never sure how the colours will turn out.
The hair, clothes and background all work similarly but are even looser with a lot less thought put into them.
And the final result? I don’t think I’ve got a perfect likeness, but this one’s still going up for sale. It’s an interesting painting and not just because of the crazy flesh tones. I could claim to have seen a little bit of fear in Jos’s eyes that I’ve put into the painting. In fact I will make that claim. It’s definitely a painting that tells a story. It was very tempting to call this one England Expects. Jos is up for sale.
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