The Black Hills

I’ve had twelve paintings up on the wall of the restaurant at the Rose & Crown for a while now. Occasionally the odd one is sold but the owners don’t take a commission, insisting that the benefit they get from renting my paintings for free is enough. I keep telling them that if they see a painting they like they can have it for free but they’ve not taken me up on this. So I thought I’d take drastic action and do something especially for them. I went for portraits but, because I’m devious, I’ve disguised the painting as a landscape, like I did with C. P. Snow, in the hope that I can get it onto the restaurant wall where customers will be confused bybthis local painting of an unrecognisable scene.

The methodology was exactly the same as for C. P. Snow:.

• Find suitable source images
• Convert them to two value plans using the Notanizer app
• Put down pencil outlines of all the highlights
• Mask out the highlights
• Put down a wet into wet sky with tundra blue, tundra pink and tundra orange
• Put in the hills with those same three colours plus tundra green. I made the furthest hills lighter valued and used more of the green and slightly less blue and slightly more orange and pink as I approached the foreground. I varied the colour in places where there were boundaries in my source photo that were not in the value plan and used darker colours in the most shadowy parts of the faces, again where not picked up by the app.
• Remove the masking fluid
• Step back, decide that the white areas are too big and flat and add in a watery mix of tundra blue and tundra orange in places, with valuable advice from the Notanizer app, where I can move the slider to add more darks at the expense of highlights.

And that was me done.

I’m very happy with this one. With the subject matter being people that I know, I was more concerned about getting good likenesses and personality than about disguising the portraits as a landscape. And I’m happy with those likenesses. I’ve even managed to capture both of them smiling, which is almost unheard of when it comes to portraiture. Just like with C. P. Snow, I’m worried that the secret portraits aren’t well enough disguised and that most people will spot them straight away. But we’ll see.

This one is already on display in the Rose & Crown restaurant. It’s not for sale but will be gifted to the pub owners once they’ve worked out the secret.