New Work

Ok, I'm a day behind, I got distracted. By pizza-related shenanigans. And forgot to take the picture. But it's here now. I get there in the end. This one is not a step by step post, I didn't take pictures of the process as I went along. Is that something I should do? If you have an opinion either way, please let me know in the comments. This is a bit of a beach at sunset, at a village called Collieston, which is near to the city in which I now live, Aberdeen. It's a rocky motherlover (geogeeks, UNITE!) and all the rocks are slanted at the familiar angle. I'm not sure what rock the beach is based on - given it's location in Scotland it's a fair bet to say either granite or gneiss. Next time I'm there, I'll take way better pictures of the rocks so I can furnish you, dear readers, with my best guess. More discussion after the jump

More Darwin:In which, unsatisfied with my first study of Charles Darwin, I try again.

Hullo reader!

My painting time has been consumed by the triplet goblins of Regular Work, Other Things To Do and Minecraft. I am ashamed.

However, I now publish my second study of Charles Darwin - unfortunately I'm having trouble getting the picture manager to work, so I'll have to describe these things a bit.

The Underdrawing - soft pencil on watercolour paper

 Rookie mistake here - I got carried away with drawing him and didn't measure it out properly - now he has an unnecessarily large beard. I always make this mistake out of sheer enthusiasm.

More after the jump!

Darwin, Rationality and Renaissance

I've been away from keyboard for a few days. I actually felt guilty about neglecting this blog.  In the time I've been able to snatch inbetween doing gainful employment, I've managed to produce a portrait of Charles Darwin.

One of the sites I love to  visit and revisit is Freethought Blogs, and my favourites there, Pharyngula, En Tequila Es Verdad and Blue Collar Atheist (this is not to suggest that these are the only blogs there, or the objectively best, or that the others are somehow unworthy. These are just my favourite three of a large group that I like immensely. I strongly suggest that anyone go to see if there's anything that catches their eye there). I wanted to show them how much I appreciate their words, which entertain and inform me so well and the idea came to me all of a sudden. A long term project was born (and I'm really going to stick to it this time) . It might take me a while, but I'm going to do them each a painting.

I thought I'd start with Charles Darwin. Central to a lot of debate, he's a famous figure in science politics, as the Theory of Evolution that he proposed was received poorly in his own time (and it still seems to have some resistance even today) and is pretty fundamental to basically every biological discipline.

So, taking up some peculiarly dense watercolour paper I had found, I got stuck right in doing some pencils for a study for it. The image is taken from an old photo, rather a famous one I think, and I basically mentally cropped it. I must say that the intense tonal contrasts in his face are extraordinary - Darwin was a craggy-looking fellow. I found it really interesting to work on all his myriad crevices and wrinkles. What a life of thinking and pondering and worrying he had - no wonder! 

I agonized long and hard about whether or not to do it in monochrome, like the old photo was, or whether it should be a colour study. As you can see, this is after the first couple of layers of watercolour, and it is indeed in colour. I thought that since the reference material was in monochrome, it would be an interesting challenge to try to render it in colour. It sure was.

 More pictures of my progress on this one after the fold.