Lemmy Kilmister

Someone put up a post on LinkedIn the other day (hi Steve!) asking people what song makes them turn up the volume on the radio. Looking down the comments, this was a great excuse for me to post some of my paintings. The first time anyone mentioned a song by a band or artist that I’d painted, I replied to their comment with a painting. A great opportunity to publicise my work. Steve should really be my agent- he often puts up posts that I can comment on with a painting. Anyway, at some point someone was asking why I’d not posted a painting of Lemmy against a comment that Ace Of Spades by Motörhead was worthy of a volume crank. And I thought, yeah, why not do a portrait of Lemmy?

<Quick aside at this point. I wasn’t planning on putting that umlaut over the o in Motörhead. It’s the spell checker in WordPress that put it in there. I’m impressed.>

I searched round and found a decent photo of Lemmy. When I explored it in the Notanizer app, I found it worked better in three values than four. But with two of my last six paintings being posterised using the trippy scheme, I thought I’d better do something different and not risk going stale, so I went for my other three value painting idea and brought out the crystallised watercolours.

My established process with this medium is to:

• create a three value plan using the Notanizer app
• draw the value shape boundaries in pencil on a sheet of hot pressed (smooth) watercolour paper
• mask out all the highlights
• sprinkle watercolour crystals over all the dark areas
• go over all the dark areas with a wet brush, trying not to mix colours together. Maybe spray over some water
• once dry, sprinkle crystals over the mid tones, spray with water and dab with kitchen paper so the paint doesn’t become dark
• once dry, remove the masking fluid
• make any final adjustments if these can improve the painting

I deviated from this slightly today, not masking out the whole background and actually leaving the boundary between Lemmy and the background unmasked in a couple of places so that, at the wetting of dark areas stage, I could drag some of the colours in the few out into the background to create stray hairs.

I also did more tinkering today than usual. I:

• went over the eyes in white gouache as they weren’t standing out enough as mid tones
• added all the coloured background on the right, which was supposed to be white but had ended up messy with various drips
• added water to some crystals in a palette and used this to add the odd mid tone in places to make the painting clearer. In particular I added some colour on the bottom of Lemmy’s right cheek to separate it from his finger.

And that was me done. This is good enough to go up for sale, with the price to be found here. I’ve made it all the way through January with no clunkers!

If you’re a PAOTY judge, rest assured, my intention is to use conventional watercolours. Unless you want to see someone on the program using crystalline watercolours, in which case, yeah, I can do that instead if it’s what you want.