Maurice Yeatman And The Reverend Timothy Farthing

It was a no brainier to use black in their clothes and to have one huge black shape at the bottom.  With the verger’s brown cap and a framed notice board in the background, it was also easy to pick brown as the guest colour in this one.  I also used brown for the glasses frames.  Despite me leaving the odd empty bit for highlights, there’s a slight feeling of someone having messed about drawing glasses on people’s faces but that’s not a big problem.  It might even make them look a bit ridiculed, which added some personality and story to the painting.  For shadows in the faces, I used three different führend, starting with the darkest and then getting lighter.  There are people out there who that say you should putting the lighter values first but these paintings feel like filling a glass jar with pebbles, sand and water.  The only way to do it is big stuff first: pebbles, then sand, then water.  Starting a painting with light values feels to me like filling the jar with water first.  But that’s just me.

Anyway, I stopped at this point and took a step back wondering whether I should darken some greys, bring in some flesh tones or put in some background colour either inside or outside the frame.  And O was shocked at what I’d achieved.  I put markers down.  The verger’s likeness is pretty good.  In particular his mouth is close up enough to his nose for him to be pulling “that face”.  But the vicar’s likeness and that sad look in his eyes is off the charts.  And the lost edges in this one are amazing.  I just had to go over everything removing any pencil lines with an eraser and that was me done.

Job done.  Well chuffed with this one.