Moeen Ali, The Beard To Be Feared

This painting took about six hours, just like the last one.  I started with using the grid method to put down initial outlines, then scratched a few stray hair marks into the beard area.  Then I blocked in some of the larger areas of colour to give me an early sense of progress.  After that, I finally started properly by working on the eyes.  If you can get them right, you’re well on the way to getting a good likeness.  During this part of the painting, I’m magnifying my source photo on the iPad to help me get things exactly right.

Once the eyes are right, it’s a case of working my way around the rest of the painting in no particular order and not needing to finish one area before starting the next.  This is where I just drift away into a world of my own, beavering away with light layers of colour until I realise three or four hours have gone by and I need a break.

The places where I get most in the zone are those where I just add multiple layers of (generally) uniform colour over big areas.  Look at those two neutral bands of colour in  the background.  Each of them has at least six colours in there, all of them different.  Whenever I got bored with part of the face, I’d look at those bands and ask myself which new colours I needed to add to get them closer to the neutral colours in my source photo.

And then there’s the beard.  I was determined not to use black in there.  Instead, I started with violets, blues, reds and greens.  I think with the greens, I used three different ones, blending them into each other from left to right.  Whenever I found myself reaching for an interesting colour to use in Mo’s face or clothes, I’d add it to the beard.  And it came out brilliantly, with those scratched in hair marks all showing clearly.

For finishing touches, I smoothed out the colours in the clothes and background with paper stumps, then burnished all over the skin with some sort of ivory colour.  I didn’t smooth or burnish the beard, not wanting to spoil what I already had.  Instead I scribbled on some sepia marks in places just to make some bits darker than others.  Looking at the painting afterwards, the skin was looking too orangey and the clothes were looking a bit disconnected from the face, so I burnished all the clothes and face in ivory.  I know this shouldn’t be possible for the face, which had already been burnished but it did seem to work.

Before the final verdict, I feel I should say something about the paper I’m using.  I bought it in Hobbycraft, it’s made by Seawhite’s of Brighton and I think it may be cold pressed watercolour paper but don’t quote me on that.  And it works brilliantly, at least for me.  It’s capacity isn’t too high, which means two things: first, that my time painting is limited to about six hours because after that the paper won’t let in any more colour and, second, that my coloured paintings have this quite soft looking appearance, still looking like colour pencil paintings and not like some other medium.  But the best thing about this paper is the tooth and the way that it shows up through my pencils.  There’s a texture all over this painting that I really like.  It’s like a patina.  And even the white highlights around the edge of the beard are something that the paper put there, not me.

Anyway, I rate this one a success and it’s up for sale.

And as for the cricket XI, all I need now is a second opening batsman.  I still haven’t decided who it will be.