The City

I started by putting down pencil outlines of the same London skyline as yesterday but of a different figure underneath.  Today’s model is Sam.  Not Big Sam, just Sam.  I’ve painted Sam before.  I picked out this pose because it was sideways on, so at an angle that produced a line that looked like a skyline.

I then went over the lines with the fineliners.  For the London skyline I traced the while line, thickened some edges with the brush pen and added the needles on top of the dome.  For the figure, I started by inking in just enough lines to suggest the figure, no more.  I changed the shape of San’s nose to look like the top of Canary Wharf tower and left out her knee so that the top of her shin and thigh looked like two separate objects.  I thickened some of the lines with the brush pen, varying the thickness everywhere.

Then I added the interesting bits, bits that I thought about on my walk earlier today.  I first turned her chest into the Dome.  I wanted to add the wheel somewhere and put it in the triangle between her two legs, with the outline of the wheel tangential to two missing lines on the back of her shin and thigh.  I felt that I needed one more London landmark, so added Tower Bridge, taking advantage of those lines down Sam’s right leg.  Finally I added three cranes, something I was always planning on doing after I’d added the landmarks.

Once this was all done and I’d rubbed out any pencil marks, I opened up the inktense pencils.  Today I used them differently.  Normally, when I know that I’ll be wetting all the dry marks, I apply the pigment using the edge of the lead.  But for this painting, where I was planning on leaving lots of pencil marks dry, I used the inktense pencils like I use coloured pencils.  I held the pencils lightly at the wrong end and applied the colour with a really light touch in small circles.  I added four or five layers of colour today.  As you can see, I went for neutral colours in the top left and bottom right corners again but this time my diagonal light burst was a rainbow of colours rather than just random saturated colours everywhere.

The final stage was the quickest and the most interesting, wetting the pencil marks.  My marks were all downwards today: there was no attempt to “sculpt the figure” with my brushstrokes.  The brushstrokes were of varying length and I tried hard not to create a regular periodic rhythm of strokes.  I tried to make some of the water marks look like out of control drips and in some places make these drips pool on lines that they landed on.  And that was me done.

Throughout the painting, I tried to tread a narrow path with the figure, making it not look too much like a figure or a skyline but something that could be interpreted both ways.  I’m pretty pleased with how it turned out.

This is one of my all time favourite paintings.  There’s so much there to think about.  The first thing I see is the rainbow light, then I see two skylines, then I see that one of them is actually a figure.  Is there another figure there too?  Someone in the triangle between her legs.  The wheel is his body and the two lines on the back of Sam’s thigh like the forearms of someone with his hands behind his head.  A lucky accident but still!  And then there’s the message.  What is the painting trying to say about London?  Or about the people that live there?  Or, with the rainbow colours, about the LBTQ community?

I’m going to just call this one The City and leave it to people to create their own interpretations.  This one’s up for sale.