Stevie Ray Vaughan

Ok, so I’ve painted Devon Allman, Duane Allman, Eric Clapton, Allen Collins, Jerry Garcia, Billy Gibbons, David Gilmour, Warren Haynes. Jimi Hendrix, Albert King, BB King, Alex Lifeson, Gary Moore, Jimmy Page, Gary Rossington, Derek Trucks, Joe Walsh, Bob Weir, Ronnie Wood and Neil Young. There are two big names missing from that list. Peter Green will have to wait until another day because today is the day when Stevie Ray Vaughan gets his long overdue portrait painted. And I’be painted him using the crystalline watercolours.

To start with, I put down the usual pencil outline, using a grid. I didn’t plan things using the Notanizer app but did see some highlights that I wanted to reserve with masking fluid: a bit of background decor, some of the outline of the hat, the hat rim, a sparkle in the eyes, highlights in the cheeks and lower lip, a highlight in the body of the guitar, the strings and those circles along the guitar neck. Somehow I missed the frets and ended up having to add them in at the end in white gouache.

I then sprinkled on a few different crystalline watercolours in all the dark places. I went on to Notanizer App to create a two value image that identified for me all the areas in the face that I needed to darken to create a likeness: it was already clear to me that the background, guitar neck, hair and bits of the hat needed to be dark. And then I painted in all the dark areas by wetting the crystals that were in them, being careful not to mix the colours too much and to not be too heavy with the pigment.

Once the dark areas were dry, I sprinkled crystals everywhere else and sprayed them with water. Not wanting these colours to be too intense, I dabbed off a lot of the colour with a paper towel. I even tried smoothing the colour on Stevie’s arms with the paper towel.

And once this second layer was dry, the final stage was fiddling in an attempt to draw out a likeness and to make some of the shapes clearer. I added more darks in the face by sprinkling some crystals on a separate sheet of paper, dipping a wet brush into them, and painting on more shadows either where I’d missed them or where the Notanizer would add more shadows if I moved the bars. It was also at this stage that I added in the guitar frets and strengthened some highlights with white gouache. And that was me done.

While the likeness isn’t perfect (a bit of Noel Fielding in there?) I really like this one. It’s the hat (unmistakably an SRV hat), the tilt of the head, the energy of the crystals in both the dark bits (like the background) and the light bits (like the t-shirt) and even that bit of background decoration in the top left that balances the guitar. It’s good to look at, and that’s what a painting should be. This one’s up for sale.