And here's the fifth dragon in the den, Steven Bartlett. He's been given the flesh…
Paul With Markers
I’ve been out most of the day but came back to see some Facebook banter from old Christ’s boy Paul wondering whether he could get me to send him the portrait I did as an exercise a few years ago. Sure, I can do that. Anyone whose portrait I paint can have it for free. But that portrait was only in pencil in a really cheap sketch book. Hardly worth the stamp. So I thought I’d attempt Paul again using markers, not only so he’ll not be disappointed when the post arrives but also to show how far I’ve come since 2021.
I used a new app to help me do this one. It’s the Notanizer app and I’ve seen it recommended by Mitch Albala, which immediately grabs my attention. And this is a proper app, not just an internet link, so it’s something I could use where there’s no internet reception. It can divide paintings up into two, three or four sets of value shapes and there are sliding buttons that you can use to set exactly where one value ends and another starts. Moving those sliders around is a lot easier than adjusting photos using brightness and contrast knobs and then pushing them through the Art Assist App again to see how the value plans change. Actually you can choose to have value plans based on more than four values, but you only get the sliding buttons when you want 2-4 values.
Anyway, for this one I picked four values and moved the sliders round until I got to what looked like an interesting value plan. Then I used the same colours as I did for Steven Bartlett, so that was putty on all the light, medium and dark values. Then soft peach on the mediums and darks and coral on the darks.
I’m happy with this one and I hope Paul will be too. One interesting thing about it is that the marks with the putty marker show up on his forehead and give him a wooden appearance. But the best thing about it is that the distribution and proportions of lights, mediums and darks is spot on: those sliding buttons in the Notanizer app are going to make a big difference to my three layer paintings.
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