Bombay and portraits.

I was commissioned to paint a bottle of Bombay Sapphire a few months ago and I completed it earlier this month but for one thing or another I just haven't found the time to sit down and write a blog about it.

I knew from the start this would be difficult as it contained a bottle that had a difficult label, a glass that had a mixer and a crushed can. And not only did i have to contend with all this i had all the reflections to. I started on the blue of the bottle and I cant tell you how much I enjoyed painting it, then confident i moved onto the label and i felt like I had hit a brick wall as it became a very  slow process, but a slow process that was needed to make sure that i was capturing all details and lettering as well as i could.

 

G & T

30" x 30"

Oil on wooden panel

 

SOLD

 Then came the glass and it felt good to be a bit a little more free with the paint strokes after being so constrained while painting the label, but one thing that a lot of people ask me is "how do you paint glass...Its clear" and my response is always that yes the glass is clear but the surrounding environment change that to something that is quite solid in colour and so all I'm doing while painting glass is observing  the squiggles and blobs i see in the translucent object that then make up colour and eventually create the feeling of a clear glass object

I then moved onto the can and although i have painted crushed cans before i did seem to struggle a little bit, this was probably due to the fact that i had spent a long time painting it and was now on the final part and also once again yellow is never my favourite colour to paint with as i don't feel it covers well. but i finished it and was happy with the final result. I do have a few alcoholic based commissioned paintings in the next few months so keep a look out for those.

Now for those who have followed my work for a while know i LOVE portrait work and some of my favourite artists are portrait painters but with demand for the still life work i don't get much time to actually paint many portraits, but i was itching to get one done and so decided the best thing i could do was to paint on some smaller wooden panels this would then cut the painting time down considerably, I knew i wanted to paint another painting of my son Lewis now his second birthday was just around the corner and so after taking a lovely reference shot i got started and i cant tell you how happy i was with the results i believe i have made some real strides with my portraits in terms of colour, this is without doubt down to amazing artist Mitch Griffiths who invited me to his studio for a chat and master class earlier this year if i could be half as good as this man when I'm his age I'll be a very happy man, see his work here  - www.mitchgriffiths.com

 

"That's my Boy"

8" x 8"

Oil on Panel