Neil Young In Coloured Pencil

What I did was to start by putting down a drawing made up mainly of straight lines.  Even the edges of all the shadowy shapes on the face we’re straight.  Only the pupils and irises I the eyes were allowed round edges.  The eyes are always exempt from the rules that govern the rest of the painting, as you might remember form the brown eyes of Rory Burns.

After the lines were down, I had fun colouring everything in with whichever colours I could see vague hints of in my source photo.  Once I thought I was pushing the paper,s limits, I went over and burnished everything.  I think it was green gold for the hat, sepia for the shirt and shadows and white for the mutton chops.  Where I had most fun, though, was on the face.  I burnished the face with cream in the lightest places, cinnamon in the darkest and beige red in the lightest.  All three were fleshy colours that toned down the impressionistic colours underneath but I liked how the use of three colours fought back a bit against the homogenisation that I might have got with one.

After the burnishing, I had a decent painting but it wasn’t as angular as I’d wanted it to be.  Rather than stopping there, I went over some outlines, creases and face shape edges with straight lines.  For some reason I went with the helio blue reddish pencil that I already had in my hand rather than the sepia or indigo that I’d been intending to use but, hey, la-di-da.

I’ve ended up with something interesting and that’s a vague likeness of  Neil.  The straight blue lines have, if anything, made the painting worse.  So I think this idea of angular portraits can be abandoned.  Angular figure drawing with the pencils feels natural, as if it’s what the pencils want to draw.  But with portraits, using all those straight lines feels like swimming against the water.  Still, decent painting and it’s up for sale.