Tom Read Wilson

After a break of 27 days I was back to watercolour today. I thought I’d have a go at Tom Read Wilson, runner up in I’m A Celebrity 2025 and the first male ever to hold the title of the Nation’s Sweetheart. It was a no brainer to go for a posterised portrait in the trippy scheme. It felt appropriate somehow to paint Tom with the full rainbow of colours.

I followed the usual process, starting by putting down pencil outlines and masking out the highlights. When this was dry, I added the first layer of colour: the usual three reds, two yellows, one green and two blues. I put the paint on a bit too thickly and thought the pencil lines might not show through it, so I laid on some kitchen paper and gently dabbed the painting dry. I ended up with one of my better trippy underpaintings. Green was coming through as the predominant colour with a little red here and there to keep things interesting. It was the perfect jungle background for this portrait. The pencil lines still weren’t particularly visible, so I went over them again to prepare for the second layer of paint.

The second layer of paint was the usual French ultramarine. With there not being many highlight shapes in the face, this layer was needing to do a lot of the heavy lifting in creating a portrait from chaos. And when the masking fluid came off, it was clear that it had fallen short of expectations. It was ambitious of me to have most of the mouth in shadow and, when I stood back from the painting, it was difficult for my brain to fill in the missing oral details. So I tinkered, lifting off some French ultramarine, adding more red above the mouth, adding white gouache highlights and darkening the inside of the mouth by adding more of the French ultramarine, Nothing worked and I’ve ended up with Tom having a light blue upper lip and some vivid red on the face, neither of which fit with the rest of the painting.

A big flop, this one. Sorry darling.