Now You Act A Little Colder Like You Don’t Seem To Care

You know what? I’ve done one posterised landscape and plenty of posterised portraits using the trippy colour scheme but until today had never painted a figure in that style. And yet that style should be great for figures, so I gave it a go today. Today’s model is Ameeka, someone I’ve punted once before.

I picked a dark photo of Ameeka as my subject because I wanted the white highlights to be on her body and not in the backgrounds. I find that white backgrounds in my watercolour paintings either look boring or get messy with drips and smudges. And the midtone area on the left would give me a chance to include my signature rainbow spectrum amid all the randomness elsewhere in the midtones. I included Ameeka’s face in this one. This is unusual for me but I thought that the Notanizer app and the posterised technique would get me a better likeness than I could ever achieve with Inktense pencils.

I followed my usual process for posterised paintings. The only five parts of the process that were unusual were:

• masking out a border with tape
• signing the painting with masking fluid right at the start
• adding a handful of starry masking fluid spatters on the right
• adding some salt to the first pint layer to get some textured effects
• painting on the third layer by eye (albeit from a notanized image) when I found that my pencil outlines weren’t showing through the first paint layer

I’m looking up at the painting as I’m writing this and I’m liking it a lot more than I did when I finished it. After I painted that final layer by eye, I ended up with only a vague hint of arms but I’m quite liking the abstract ambiguity there. There are also great colours, emotion in the face and a three dimensional right thigh. One thing I’ve lost is the sense of Ameeka. The gender of the model is no longer clear, adding a bit of mystery. You want more mystery? OK then, I’m going to name this one after a line from Telegraph Road but I’m not going to tell you whether the subject of the painting is the person acting colder or the person receiving the cold feelings. This one is up for sale, with the price to be found here.