Matt “Guitar” Murphy

I’m still putting the band together and it’s another guitarist today. The next page Journal had a red mark somewhere in the middle, so I looked at the two portraits that were earmarked for orange and brown and went for the one where there would be a bit of colour to cover up that red mark.

The likenesses still aren’t coming out but the mood definitely is. I had to mess around quite a bit with this one at the end, using a white gel pen and the thin point of the marker pen to try to improve the likeness, so ended up feeling a bit frustrated with progress. On the other hand, something I did differently, and need to keep doing, was to colour in the big dark areas by moving the marker in circles rather than with loads of thick adjacent stripes. Things look better this way.

Four down, six to go.

<Edit: I had another go at Matt a couple of days later but it was worse, so I’ve been back to this one and tried to eliminate some of the spots on his face with white gouache: it’s an improvement and good enough for this one to earn a place in the final collection>