When I’m Paid I Always See The job Through

I can’t do too many watercolours in a row without pining for a change of media so I was in the coloured pencils today, doing a portrait of Angel Eyes, played by Lee Van Kleef in The Good, The Bad And The Ugly. I was prepared to go slow on this one and spread it out over a couple of days but I got into a groove and finished it after a monster five hour session.

As usual, this one has loads of layers of colouring it. Each layer was motivated by either (i) local colour, (ii) light and shadow, (iii) impressionistic colours I could see in the source photo, (iv) impressionistic colours that I made up and thought might look good, and (v) temperature, paying attention in particular to James Gurney‘s facial colour zones.

This is much more of a closeup than my most recent three coloured pencil portraits, so I paid much more attention to the eyeshadow normal, zooming in closely on the eyes in my source photo to see the highlights in the eye and all the different colours in the iris. It’s always a good sign when my eyeballs come out spherical and they’ve done that today. I’m not convinced by the likeness though: if I zoom in on the eyes they really could be anybody’s.

I was quite close to completion and a bit frustrated at how the light and shadowy bits of the face weren’t harmonising with each other, so my final layer was a single colour over whole face. Not a burnishing layer: just an extra layer of colour. And for that layer, rather than using a sensible flash tone, I used terracotta, an earthy orange that I thought matched the skin colours in the source photo. A smart decision: the terracotta worked well.

And to finish off, rather than using blending medium or blending pen or burnishing everything, I blended most if the painting with a paper stump. It’s been ages since I did it and I think it looks great, with the tooth if the paper visible. The eyes and lips, though, those I burnished with the white pencil to make them shine and stand out. And that was me done.

The verdict? An interesting interpretation and good enough to go up for sale. I’m not 100% convinced by the likeness but this is Angel Eyes, not LeeVan Kleef.