Sir Roger Moore

I thought I’d have another go at Sir Roger Moore today. He’s one of a number of people that I feel I owe a portrait after having had a go once and not given justice to. My source photo looked like it would work with three values and I was undecided between whether to use crystalline watercolour or to paint a posterised painting in the trippy colour scheme. It was only while out walking on the North Downs this morning that I decided to go for the crystalline watercolours. What swing it for me was that my value plan had a lot of dark areas and highlights and not much mid tone. And the trippy colour scheme needs those mid tone areas to bedazzle the viewer.

I followed my usual process with the crystals:

• I used the Notanizer app to devise a three value plan
• I put down pencil outlines of all the value shapes with the aid of a grid
• I masked out all the highlights
• I sprinkled crystals where er I needed darks
• I went over all the darks with a wet brush, allowing the colours in the crystals to come through. It’s important during this stage to rinse and dry the brush between every single stroke, otherwise the paint turns muddy.
• once that was dry, I sprinkled crystals over all the mid tones, sprayed them with water, and, after waiting a few seconds, pressed down kitchen paper to remove all the water from the paper.

later on I would, of course, remove all the masking fluid. But first I took a long look at the painting and decided that Roger’s jacket was looking too light, this being the result of sprinkling over it too light a set of crystal colours. So I sprinkled on some darker crystals, sprayed on water and dabbed it off with kitchen paper. That gave a better result and, after removing all the masking fluid, that was me done.

When I look at some of my portraits, I’m amazed at the likenesses that I can get with just a few simple marks. And then I look at these crystalline watercolour portraits and I’m amazed at what I can create from what looks like a load of random marks. Before the masking fluid comes off, these paintings look a complete mess; removing the masking fluid is like magic, creating order from chaos.

This one isn’t my favourite ever crystalline watercolour portrait: the background is a bit muddy, making it seem like there’s still some chaos there. But it’s going up for sale with the price to be found here. There’s enough of Sir Roger coming through to make it intriguing.