Slash

Today I have been mostly painting Slash. This is a posterised painting using the blue colour scheme, as described here, so the colour are cerulean blue, French ultramarine and quinacridone magenta.

There were quite a few fiddly bits today, so as well as masking out the highlights at the start, I also masked out the lights and mediums after the first and second respectively. All that drying time meant that this one took a little over four hours, so multiple applications of masking fluid won’t work if I make it to Portrait Artist Of The Year.

Another thing I did differently was to only pencil down the lines for the first two layers, adding the final magenta layer by eye. To help me do this, I removed any masking fluid from the face that would not abut any dark areas: that made it much easier for me to relate what was on the paper to my source photo and value plan.

After everything was dry and I removed the masking fluid, I wasn’t happy with the likeness and fingered a little, mainly going overtone light cerulean layer, which was a bit too pale on places, but also changing the shape of the jawline.

And as a final step, I painted in a sky background with the same three colours: the white background didn’t look right (and had a few smudges on it).

The final painting is going up for sale. The likeness isn’t perfect. There’s something about the nose that reminds me of Michael Jackson. Still, it’s full of character and recent comments by the PAOTY judges suggest that they value character more than likeness, so who knows what they’d think of this?