Kevin Keegan

Back for another go with the crystalline watercolour and today it’s my first go at using them for a portrait. Today’s subject is the legend that is Kevin Keegan.

I got the idea from a Liz Chaderton video this morning to use the crystalline watercolour with wax resist. So I got my pencil drawing down, then tried to all the highlights by drawing in them with a candle. It’s clear from how things turned out that I left too many white holes in the wax resist, resulting in textured areas rather then white areas. Oh well. Then I sprinkled on loads of the crystalline watercolour. I tried to keep yellow in the background and a bit of red in the shirt but was otherwise pretty random. Then I sprayed water all over it and watched it do its thing for a couple of minutes.

For the final stage, the plan was to go over all the darkest areas with a brush, turning these random colours into darker greys and purples. It was hard for me to see the pencil marks to guide me beneath that paint and, what with the paper still being wet from all the spraying, I couldn’t be as detailed with the darks as I’d wanted to be. I did manage to link the darks in the eyes into the darks in the hair, though, which I liked. When things had dried a bit, I tried going over the darks again, mixing up my colour by wetting some crystals on scrap paper. But this wasn’t ideal as I had trouble linking the eyes into the hair (which I didn’t want to cover all over again).

I’ve ended up with a really loose painting. A likeness of Kevin was coming through at one point but quickly disappeared. And the hair looks unbalanced: too much on the right and not enough on the left. This one’s a reject.

Going forward, there are two clear lessons for the next time I try something like this:

• masking fluid will work better than wax resist for reserving whites: wax resist has its place and it’s in creating textures
• I should try painting over scattered crystals in the dark areas with a wet brush before spraying water over the crystals in the medium tone areas: this way I can add more detail

I might give these crystals another go tomorrow. I may even have another go at the same portrait