Sergeant Arthur Wilson II

Just like everyone else in the collection, Wilson started with a pencil outline, using a grid, before being brought to life with dark greys, then lighter greys, then flesh tones.  I has some trouble eking a likeness out of this one, so added quite a few layers and used the blending pen much more than usual.  I added the blue background to balance against Godfrey and Pike when the collection is all put together.

One new thing I started doing with this painting was being a bit more careful about rubbing out gridlines and outlines.  Rather than rubbing out the gridlines once the outlines were down, then putting back any outlines I’d missed, then rolling the putty eraser on the paper to make the outlines faint, I didn’t rub anything out until I needed to.  So, for example, just before added the first dark grey shapes I rubbed out any gridlines that went through these shapes.  And once those shapes were down, I rubbed out their outlines.  This way, I could see the complete portrait clearly throughout the process.

What I ended up with wasn’t a perfect likeness.  In fact I can see almost as much of Robert Bathurst coming through as I can of John Le Mesurier. But as this is a portrait of the character and notion the actor playing him, that’s a plus isn’t it?  I’m not sure whether there’s any character coming through from this one though.  If there’s any indecisiveness there, it can be put down to the pose and not to me.  But this does look like a real human being and not just a character from a sitcom.  I think this one is good enough to include in the collection, even if it’s looking like the weakest so far.

One more to go and it’s the other one of my favourite two characters.