Paint The Whole World With A Rainbow

It was only a matter of time before I did a posterised painting of the Rainbow crew using the trippy colour scheme. And yesterday Steve on LinkedIn, a constant source of ideas, put up a Rainbow-related post and seemed disappointed that I didn’t have a Rainbow painting to put in the comments: the closest I could get was The City. So I thought I’d have a go at a team painting today.

I followed my usual process with the trippy scheme, starting with some pencil outlines put down on paper using a value plan from the Notanizer app. I didn’t follow the app religiously, instead choosing to make the background mid toned or highlighted wherever the character in front of it was highlighted or mid toned respectively. And in putting down the masking fluid, I was more scribbly than I normally am.

Then the mid times were the usual two yellows, three reds, two blues and green and, once that was dry, I painted French ultramarine wherever I wanted darks. I used my pencil outlines for the marks on Zippy and George but adopted a freehand approach with Bungle, even adding in some expressive dry brush strokes in places.

When I peeled off the masking fluid and looked at the result, I could see two big problems:

• The first was above Bungle’s right ear where there were some weird blue marks on the paper, looking like they were something to do with how I’d scribbled on the masking fluid. They didn’t look good, so I covered them up with transparent yellow and dropped in a bit of rose dore and Winsor blue (green shade). It looks like it was painted on with all the mid tones until you know it wasn’t, then it looks different to the rest of the background
• The second was that Bungle didn’t have a face: the dark areas over his mouth and eyes too flat looking. So I added a third layer of paint, quinacrinone magenta, in the very darkest places I also put a bit of the magenta in his fur to try to harmonise the painting.

And that was me done. Zippy and George are fine but Bungle looks messy. I guess there’s that sense that Bungle is different to the other two somehow and that this adds a sinister feeling, but it doesn’t feel sinister enough to make this one special. Good enough t go up for sale? Borderline. Let’s put it up for now. The price is here.