No Ma’am: We’re Musicians

Monday’s always a short day for me, so I thought this would be the perfect excuse to take a break from the posterised Newington landscapes and to do something using the Inktense pencils. As subject matter I chose a photo of Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi as The Blues Brothers.

I used the Notanizer app to convert my source photo to a silhouette but I don’t consider this to be a posterised painting as I made no special effort to keep my silhouette shape to a single, dark value. Instead, my intention was to make it as colourful as possible. There’s no point in me saying whether that means lots of saturated colours or a single neutral colour with lots of hints of primaries and secondaries within it: all I can do with Inktense pencils is to put down lots of colour and let the water decide what to do with all that pigment. It turned out to be somewhere between the two extremes.

I put down an outline in pencil first, then filled it with colour. I started with saddle brown everywhere, just to set some boundaries and to give me something to hang everything else off of. After the layer of brown, I added a layer of green, using all four of my greens in random places. Then a layer using my four reds, again in random places. Then violet in a few places. Then a blue layer, using all four of my blues including the really dark indigo. And finally a layer with my orange and two yellows. I tried to make the sunglasses colourful and to keep the sun yellow to the left side of all the shapes, but otherwise everything was pretty random.

And then it was time to wet the pigment, always the fun part, and the part where I hand over the controls to the water. And it all came out quite colourful. In a couple of places, I ran the wet and slightly pigmented brush over some white areas to create a medium tone – take a look at the right (our right) of Dan’s face. Nice.

Today was mainly about fun but I ended up with something interesting enough to put up for sale. It was an experiment, mixing so many Inktense colours together and it may well be something I try again another time. What I like least are the two white shapes representing John’s right hand: they’ve lost some accuracy because of the way I put down colour using the edge of the pencil rather than the point. And I guess the shadow under John’s chin is a bit dark, making it look like a beard. But that watery colour on Dan’s face makes this one for me.