Stephen Hawking Reading The Guardian

Ok.  Time to try out the inktense pencils properly.  I had two gos at doing a painting of a young Stephen Hawking reading The Guardian.  The idea behind these wasn’t to produce nice finished paintings but just to get a feel for using these pencils.

The one on the right was the first one I did.  I just drew in lines and hoped that they’d run after I added a bit of water.  They didn’t so I brushed some water over instead But the lines themselves proved a bit resilient and were still showing when I hoped they’d have faded away a bit.

So, second time around (on the left) I just shaded areas in with the pencils.  This came out looking better, a bit like a watercolour.  The diagonal stripes added a bit of energy, which was good.  The accidental man bun was obviously bad.  Also not great was how my pencil guide lines are showing.  I think next time I need to remove the guide lines before adding water.  And either add some lines afterwards or just harden some ink edges.  I might need to think carefully about subject matter too – go for flowers or nudes?  And style-wise, maybe go for the Jean Haines wishy washy look, which these pencils seem well suited to.

These paintings are obviously for the bin but they do say that if you want to improve, you need to paint for the bin, not the wall.