We’re Gonna Have To Reap From Some Seed That’s Been Sowed

Guess who it is? It’s the Coldplay Couple! For the benefit of future me reading this in ten years time, this is a couple of married people having an affair who were caught on an audience camera at a Coldplay concert. Why made it worse, at least in my eyes, as that this was a chief exec and his head of HR, two people that should be keeping their hands off each other for independence reasons. They were big news in July 2025 and the subjective all sorts of memes.

Anyway I picked out these two for a portrait for two reasons:

• so that I could easily tick off what might have been a problematic line in my mission to name create a series of paintings named after every line in Telegraph Road
• because it looked like it work well in three votes, giving me a great opportunity to try out my new crystalline watercolours.

I followed my usual process, starting by putting down pencil outlines, masking out the highlights and adding some masking spatters in the background. Then I sprinkled crystals over all the darks and painted over them with a wet brush. I was careful to include my most saturated colours in the background: the yellow, the orange, the reds, the blues and the brightest green. It’s my best background in crystalline watercolours for a long time; the colours blend into each other without creating mud. I also made sure to use blues, reds and a purple for the dress but was otherwise pretty indiscriminate. Before going to the next stage, I stared at the painting, pondered and eventually decided to add more darks than in my original plan. Then it was on to the last step, sprinkling crystals over the medium tones, spraying with water and dabbing it off. And after removing all the masking fluid, that was me done.

And, while the background is encouraging, I have to put this one down as a fail. The white areas in the guy’s body are too big and it looks as if he has a conical neck, like a Cluedo piece. I could have tried rescuing this one by darkening some of those white areas but I couldn’t see this one ever working out. And I’m not too depressed because the choice of subject matter makes it unlikely that I’d ever have put this on up for sale anyway.