Spectre Of The Gun

The idea for this one came to me last night. I was googling around, looking at reviews of some forthcoming Star Trek episodes and found this still which was just skiing to be painted in posterised form using the trippy colour scheme. It’s from Spectre Of The Gun which I think is on tomorrow night. These three are probably Wyatt Earp played by Ron Soble, Virgil Earp played by Charles Maxwell and Morgan Earp played by Rex Holman but it’s possible that one of them is Doc Holliday played by Sam Gilman. Apologies for not being able to be more specific.

I started by using the Notanizer app to identify highlights and reserving these with masking fluid. I didn’t put down any masking spatters for stars. Next came the first layer of colours, using viridian, cerulean blue, Winsor blue (green shade), Winsor red, rose dore, quinacridone magenta, Indian yellow and transparent yellow. The viridian came out quite ugly as it dried but otherwise allow as OK.And then I made my big mistake. I was intending on spattering on making fluid at this stage. This would have been at a later stage than usual. There were two ideas behind this. One was that the stars would come out in lots of different colours. The other was that I only wanted stars in the dark areas and that when I rubbed off all the spatters at the end, this is why I’d have got. But I forgot to spatter over the masking fluid.

Instead I went straight in with the second layer of paint, French ultramarine over all the darks. I didn’t use the Notanizer app to pick out the darks: I’d already decided that the figures would all be dark and the background left in multicoloured midtones, befitting the surrealness of this Star Trek episode. This layer was added freehand without using a pencil to mark out shapes. The left shoulder of the guy on the right ended up too wide, so I dabbed it off and pointed some more background colours into the area left behind. At the same time, I tried adding more viridian in the top right and got a marginal improvement.

For a finishing touch, I sputtered some white gouache into the figures and, after removing all the masking fluid and being pleasantly surprised by the portraits, that was me done.

Somehow, this one came out vaguely OK, mainly because of an accurate middle portrait in the masking fluid layer. My overall concept works too, with the surreal background and the scary white faces both working well. This one would have been so much better, though, had I not forgotten the vital masking fluid spattering step halfway through the process. Is it worthy of a place in the shop window though? I say nay: the portrait on the left just looks wrong.