Ronnie Wood

It’s hard to describe how I paint in oil pastels because there’s no real process.  Once a pencil outline’s down, I move around randomly from shape to shape, tending to put down at least three colours everywhere and to mix them on the paper wither with my fingers with a rubber thing on a stick.  Colour-wise I try to match values but I also drop in colours that I can see in my source or colours that I just feel like adding.  Today you might have spotted that I fancied using a bit of green in the skin tones.

I think I spent too long on the painting today.  The likeness was looking really good early on but I kept trying to improve it.  Part of my problem was that I couldn’t decide whether I wanted visible pastel marks in the face or to have it all smoothed out.  So I’d put in more colour, decide I wanted it smoothed out, then change my mind and add on more colour, etc.   Eventually I worked out that I was just creating mud and decided to stop.  There was still a little bit of corrective work to be done afterwards, reducing the amount of hair on the left by adding more sky colours and smoothing them over the hair and adding black around Ronnie’s hair and chin to get the shape of his head right.  And that was me done.

I like the hair in this one, especially around the edges where I put down hair marks in all sorts of bright colours and then filled the gaps between them with black.  And I like Ronnie’s t-shirt, which I spent a lot of time drawing in pencil to start with but which gradually loosened up after that.  Ronnie himself is recognisable.  There’s a definite likeness there but he doesn’t look like the Ronnie in my source photo.  I may have made him a bit younger.

Anyway, Ronnie’s up for sale.