Something about that Joe Jordan painting yesterday put me in a nostalgic mood and wanting…
The Earps
After discovering Friday’s disaster I wanted to come up with a proper painting of The Earps as quickly as possible. This was finished ar about 10:30 on a Sunday morning. Surely some kind of record?
Rather than write out all over again how I put this one together, I’ll just copy and paste from Friday:
It didn’t take me long to plan this one as a set of four faded photos against a desert background. What else could I have done? I was planning on painting all three in sepia but decided at the last minute to use three different faded looking colours. Morgan on the left was painted with a mix of burnt umber and French ultramarine, Wyatt in the middle is in Payne’s grey and Virgil on the right is in sepia. A long overdue starring role for burnt umber, Payne’s grey and sepia, the loyal squad players in a palette of colourful superstars. The background was painted using the desert supergranulators: a random wet into wet mix of the yellow, orange, brown and grey.
The painting was prepared with pencil grids, masking tape for frames and masking fluid for some fine detail in the eyes. I used the Notanizer app to plan my values, starting with a single value plan (highlights and darks) with the bars set at points where a single value would be enough to achieve a likeness. As an insurance plan, I also looked for second bars at which I could divide the highlights into lights and whites and noted this down. After I’d put down all the darks, I was happy so didn’t bother with a second, more watery, lighter layer of colour to improve the likenesses. I did, though, add watery colour around some of the edges to distinguish the photos from their white borders.
So there you go. Job done. A definite success and worth putting up for sale.
But I’m still left with a slightly hollow feeling. While I’m happy to be influenced by other artworks in what I do, I don’t like copying and that includes copying my own work. I didn’t feel as much passion painting this one as I normally do. And it could have been better too. All of the portraits are a little bit too far to the left for my liking and Virgil on the right feels a bit empty with his eyes covered up. Oh well.
Leave a Reply