Next up in the Led Zep collection is the late John Bonham. He's going to…
Major The Hon. John Wickham Gascoyne Beresford Steed
This one took me a couple of days but it was worth it. I picked out John Steed as played by the late Patrick MacNee in The Avengers and The New Avengers as my subject because I wanted someone prim and proper, befitting the pinstriped texture I was hoping to create.
Pinstriped texture! What pinstriped texture? Well, I’ve had this box sitting round for a couple of weeks now:
I’m not sure what was originally in it. Something for the wife I think. Anyway, it’s covered in these stripy ridges that are just begging to be used to add texture to a watercolour painting, so that’s what I’ve been doing over the last couple of days.
This one is a two layer glazed painting: one layer of tundra pink over the medium and dark tones followed by a layer of tundra blue over the darks. Why only two layers today? Well, first because the third layer in my last three layer tundra painting came out looking muddy and second because with only two layers I was hoping to be able to create and see stripy textures in every layer: three layers might have been pushing it.
I started by putting down a pencil drawing using a grid. Today, rather than drawing the portrait itself, I just drew the boundaries of the layer that I was going to be painting in pink. I was happy that with those pink areas down on the paper I wouldn’t have any problems working out where to paint the blue in the second layer. I masked out any small highlights that I wanted to stay white and masked the boundaries of all the big pink shapes. This might sound a bit excessive. My reasoning was that I wanted to put all the pink down quickly so that it was still wet when I pressed down the textured surface: if I took my time getting the big shapes right, some of the paint might dry in places. Anyway, once the masking was done, I put down the tundra pink in all the required areas. If anything was even hinting at drying, I dropped in more of the pink, wet into wet. If I waited until I was sure the paint was drying, there was a real danger of creating cauliflowers. And once I was happy that all the pink areas were covered and that the paint was sufficiently wet everywhere, I put the ridged cardboard down on it, oriented horizontally, weighed it down with a pile of books and left it overnight.
Then this morning, this is what I found underneath it all:
And that, my friends, is what I call a successful experiment. The tundra pink is variegated, bluer in some places and pinker in others. But that texture! Horizontal lines clearly visible everywhere and looking a bit like computer code. It even reminds me of this Tom Jones album cover. I seriously considered just removing the masking fluid and stopping here but decided to carry on. I thought a second layer could seriously improve what was already a pretty good likeness.
So I carried on with the second layer: tundra blue. I started with a few bits of masking fluid where I needed to reserve small, medium tone, pink shapes. Once this was dry I again worked quickly, keeping everything wet, while also trying not to disturb the (non–staining) first layer of paint. I considered orienting the stripes in the second layer with a gentle upward slope, parallel to the tilt in Steed’s hat, but decided in the end to go for vertical stripes. So, just as before, I put the ridged cardboard onto the wet paint and weighed it down.
And after five or six hours, I took everything away to find one of my greatest ever paintings underneath. Not only do the stripes show up in the blue layer, but the pink stripes are still visible everywhere, even where there’s blue over the top and I’ve ended up with a criss crossed pattern.
My original plan was to wet all the background, fill it with watery tundra orange and tundra green, cover it with bubble wrap and weigh it all down overnight but I changed my mind. There’s a lot of white left untouched on the paper but it doesn’t feel wrong and I do like the lost edges on the hand: people can picture much more realistic hands in their heads than I can paint on paper.
So there you go. A big success. Where next? More Avengers? Stripy textures with different colour schemes? Stripy textures at different angles? Stripy textures combined with bubble wrap textures? Stripy textures on landscapes? All sorts of possibilities have opened up.
Oh, and Steed’s obviously up for sale but only as part of The Avengers 1965-67 Collection.
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