The Man Who Found Out

After fixing a load of charcoal paintings the other day, I was in the mood for some charcoal action but took the day off yesterday to have another look through the Nathan Fowkes book on charcoal portraits to remind myself of some of his ideas. Today, though, I was back in action.

I picked out a good source photo of a face with a lot of shadow in and behind it and started by putting down a rough outline. I then started adding shadows with the Derwent charcoal blocks. I went with Mars Violet at first but found myself adding in some sanguine and ochre on the right for variety. Later, for the finer detail in the face, I used charcoal pencils, going for the three purple colours: heather mist, lavender and glowing embers. Later I also used elderberry in places in the face. I used a little green moss in the racket and white (in both coloured pencil and block form) in various places where I needed highlights. I didn’t use vine charcoal at all in this painting.

For smoothing out colours, I mainly used fingers and a chamois. Fingers were good for darkening light areas, bringing pigment over from the shadows. I didn’t put down any mid tones, creating them with my fingers instead. Smoothing with a chamois was interesting though: it tended to lighten values, so with my fingers and the chamois working in opposite directions, it felt as if I had some control of those pesky values.

I got to something looking like one of Nathan Fowkes’ portraits pretty quickly but then spent ages adding more layers trying (and ultimately failing) to find a likeness. This looks nothing like Tony Curtis, does it? Maybe I’ll just name this one after an Algernon Blackwood short story instead.

I thought seriously about putting this one up for sale. There might not be the likeness of Tony but it’s a great portrait of somebody else. There’s character there, there are facial features vague enough to be recognisable but that allow the viewer to fill them in, there’s a variegated colour background, there are interesting diagonal stripes on the shirt and jacket… It’s just an interesting painting. In the end, though, it went into the reject pile. The more I hold back the clunkers, the better everything else looks.