If you’re thinking about commissioning a portrait, cost is usually the first question. Here’s a breakdown of what affects the cost of a portrait commission with me, so you know what to expect before you get in touch. My current prices These are starting prices for a single head-and-shoulders portrait in either pencil or oils.• Pencil portrait — from £600• Oil portrait — from…
I still use the crosshatching technique I learned at school . It has an energy that reminds me of stone carving and I approach it in a similar way. Although the stone or marble carving process is different in the sense it is reductive it still has an aspect which is akin to modelling and refining with chisels.
The painted surface is its own universe. I pour my life into it, gather my life on to it. I wanted to paint in the picture a whole that shows everything at once, every thought, all time, every cause and effect. Each brushstroke is a thought that relates to all the others in one gestalt. In eastern philosophy there is the idea of Indras…
I’m using other people’s references right now and this is from Howard Lyon. I’m very grateful that he has provided such a good resource for artists, at reasonable prices. Selecting images among the ones I bought is painstaking and it’s difficult to say exactly why I choose specific images. From 1000 images there are a handful I can use. He has created albums with…
Schrödinger spoke about life being a kind of negative entropy and this is close to the Buddhist idea of life force that brings parts together to form a whole which is life. Buddhism says it is possible to fuse our microcosmic life with the macrocosm. And the opposite of this positive force would be entropy. Of course everything is subject to the law of…
Photography never does justice to painting so I would like to qualify this image by saying it’s better in real life. Since the summer I have been revisiting earlier styles of painting, ones that predate this blog..! Using mixed media with a lot of wiping out and redrawing. I didn’t think I would paint like this again, but themes that run through all my…
This blog has been filled with a lot of portrait paintings and thoughts about portrait paintings, but I also make other work which I add from time to time! This is a fairly recent work, that I have been working on it for the last year or so, and it has developed in a surprising way, with dots! I have been banging my head…
I can’t take too much credit for the composition of this one which was originally photographed on the Cornish coast, one of my favourite places! I like the dribble of seawater coming off the net on the left. Its a good dribble. This was another painting that I began in acrylics and finished in oil paint, and its a method I am going to…
This is a portrait commission I did a while ago but have never shown it. It’s actually a posthumous portrait from a photo. It’s interesting because I was trying to work out how to start a portrait in acrylics and then glaze with oils. I’m still trying to find a way of painting that I can settle on. I’m a bit of a technical…
Here is a before and after picture. The first colour glaze took about 90 minutes In my portraits I would use this colour layer as a kind of underpainting and continue to refine the modelling in further glazes.
I don’t want to seem like I’m making any grand claims but I hope to show in a new video what for me is something like the process of glazing that Caravaggio used. I’m coming to this based on trial and error. How nice it would be to travel back in time to watch him at work! But from looking carefully at his paintings…
I have painted a number of these over the years but haven’t shown any until now. I thought this one worked well with the glazing process. I obviously stuck closely to the photo reference I was sent, and I painted the face using a Raw Umber and Titanium White underpainting, or grisaille and then followed this with glazes and halfpastes of Titanium White, Cadmium…
I feel I have finally found a way to bring all the elements of my practice together at the same time and from now will be embarking on a new series of work in pen. As a sculptor by training I have always love drawing first and foremost and specifically drawing from the figure. Figure drawing in itself is more like a technical exercise…
This is the first of a number of Velazquez paintings I would like to try and copy. You can see the video in real time on my patreon channel, see the link here on my website. I was interested in what palette he used and also in his use of the imprimatura and how that was left for some of the middle tones and…
Hi there, I’ve been looking forward to doing this for a while, and now I’ve completed the films of both the glazes. Here is a photo of before and after the 2nd glaze. So this is the painting again showing the change from the 1st to the 2nd glaze, and then following on from that you can see the 2nd glaze next to the…