Sinead O’Connor

Sometimes want to painting but am in a “clean mood” and don’t fancy making a mess, cover up the desk with a sheet and cleaning stuff up afterwards. That’s how I felt yesterday, so watercolour, soft pastels and oil pastels were ll ruled out. I’d not used the coloured pencils for a while, though, and had an idea in mind, so coloured pencils it was. The subject was the late Sinead O’Connor. I think you can tell from who I do paint that Sinead’s music was never to my taste, but what a great portrait subject she made!

I started with a rough pencil outline, using a grid, mainly freehand with only a couple of measurements with a ruler when I was struggling in one place. While doing this, I marked down all the darkest areas, doing this by sight for once rather than using the Notanizer app.

Then I coloured in all the dark areas in eight layers, starting really light and only increasing pressure later when the tooth of the paper was filling up and a bit of extra force became necessary. My first four layers were the usual four: delft blue, dark red, dark pthalo green and helio blue reddish. After putting these four layers down, I realised I’d missed an important step, so I grabbed my pointy stick four layers too late and used it to put down grooves for highlights in the microphone head and in a couple of places on the lips. Lucky for me, they came out OK and my mistake wasn’t costly. For the rest of my dark layers, I added whatever colour I thought was necessary at the time to bring the dark back towards a neutral colour. First up was magenta, then pine green, then deep scarlet red and finally Prussian blue. The Prussian blue was a bit disappointing. Being a colour that’s transparent in watercolour, it’s a good ingredient in blacks and doesn’t turn colours muddy. But it did muddy my coloured pencil darks.

Anyway, it was getting late by this time, so I stopped for the night, leaving things like this:

Back to the painting today, and once it became apparent that I wouldn’t be able to add another layer of colour to the darks, my objectives for the day became to add colour, add mid-tones, correct errors and smooth out colours.

I started by colouring in the mid-tones. I started by colouring them in lightly using whichever of the eight colours in my darks felt right. But once the mid-tones had been marked out like this, I went to town. I added loads of extra layers using all these colours plus some fleshy tones (raw umber, cream, beige red, cinnamon) to hold things back just a teeny bit. The more colour that was down on the paper and the more the mid-tone areas started to merge together (connected in places by non-highlight light tones), the more I could jam by letting my pencils dance all over the page in all the different places. No Grateful Dead in the background today but Neil Young did a great job.

Once I thought I’d got exactly the optimal amount of colour in the skin, I stopped to evaluate the painting. There were a couple of places where I could make things look better by extending the dark areas, so I did this: only the first four layers were required to do this. And the teeth were looking too white, so I dropped in some really subtle blues, reds and greens.

Finally, I smoothed out the colours. For once I remembered to do this using a paper stump rather than burnishing with a white pencil or painting over everything with blending pens or blending medium. And I’m glad I did. I think paper stumps work best for me, not just blending everything better but also creating fuzzy edges. And that was me done.

There’s a lot to like about this one. The ear, the mouth, the shapes, the head of the microphone, the skin colours. All that holds it back for me is the left eye. Something’s not right about it. But it’s not the first thing you notice. The eye is drawn to the mouth, with the microphone helpfully pointing the way. All in all, though, an encouraging painting in a style that I need to give another go at some point. This one’s up for sale, with the price to be found here.

In other news, I’ve been rejected by Portrait Artist Of The Year again. I’ll be applying again next year.