David Cameron Watercolour Sketch

Another sketch of David Cameron this time just using watercolour paint.

Once again not a brilliant likeness, but this time I have taken a few pictures (unlike the picture at the top of the post I have used my mobile phone for the ones below, so the colours are not as close to the real thing) of the work in progress. A picture like this takes about an hour and half to complete, the actual painting time is probably more like half an hour but watercolour is pretty runny stuff and you have to leave it to dry for a bit at some points. Some of the time you can overcome this by painting one area while another one dries.  

The first stage here is to find a photo to copy, good old internet, in this case I have used a person everyone should recognise.

The skin tones are made up of a light brown called yellow ochre which is a very cheap pigment and rose madder which a fairly expensive pigment, in both cases if you let one layer of pint dry and paint the same paint on top you get  much darker shade.

the hair is a very dark brown called Vandyke brown, it is a very strong pigment which goes a long way, my tube says 2/6 and 13p on it  

The lips are brown madder 

the eyes cerulean blue 

watercolour is very unforgiving, you either use very cheap paper like I do

these pads come from The Works and if you make a mistake you just start again, or expensive paper where to a lesser or greater degree you can get the paint off with a wet sponge. 

Finally on to the bit that is difficult for me to talk about, in a general sense I think if you have to say anything much about a painting then this is a sigh that the painting is a failure. Obviously if you have to write David Cameron under this one then the painting has issues.

The other side of the coin here is that a painting has something that a photograph doesn’t, obviously I couldn’t paint a perfect likeness of the photograph I used, so some of what makes the painting has to my lack of ability. But there is also the business of expressing something that a photograph doesn’t. perhaps expressing something of the way I see things to people who are not me.