Michael Clarke Duncan

Ok, so there was still time left in the day for a portrait with the markers.  The Daredevil film was on the telly the other day and I couldn’t help noticing that the late Michael Clarke Duncan, who played the Kingpin, would make a great portrait subject.

I found a great moody photo with lots of shadows and made a start by blacking out lots of shadow areas, like I did with John Paul Jones not too long ago.  But then what to do after that?  With MCD being dark skinned it would have been all too easy to reach for the brown marker and I wasn’t convinced that my selection of flesh tones would really cut it, so I continued with neutral greys and ended up with something in black and white.

After thinking for a while about whether I should stop at that point, I decided that I needed some background to contrast against the white highlights on MCD’s head.  I went for this metallic blue colour as it suited the monotone nature of what I’d already drawn.  But when I added the background blue, I found that I’d messed up the head shapeM which is why I ended up adding black outlines.  You can see some blue on MCD’s right jowl that was squeezing his lower head too tightly before I added the outline.

Good drawing?  Yeah.  All this work on figure drawing has improved my use of values so much that I can now do black and white drawings lime this!  The neck and body Look very MCD but I’m not convinced about the facial likeness.  There’s definitely personality in there though.  This has ended up as a very sad, bluesy looking drawing as if MCD is contemplating his own mortality and a life barely lived.  He was only 54 when he died.

I’m feeling proud of this one.  It’s up for sale.