Latest Boxing/Sports painting

Over the past month or so I have been working away in the studio working on my latest sport painting, and thought I would blog about the process from start to finish.

It all started whilst I was working out at my local gym and noticed this guy working out and immediately I thought to myself that he would be perfect for a painting I'd had in my head for a while. He was big at 6ft 3 and was covered in tattoos, so, not one to let an opportunity slip by I approached him and explained that I was an artist and told him all about my new body of work based on sports. He told me that he actually was a semi professional boxer and that he was in training for a fight, right there and then I knew he was the perfect guy to model for my latest piece. 

I booked him in for a photo shoot about three weeks after we had initially met, I had a rough idea on the composition I wanted and  so went about taking a number of photographic references.

When I then got back to the studio I uploaded all the photos into photoshop and found that the image was making his skin tone far to orange for the final look I wanted in my painting.

I wanted a loose background mixed of blues, whites, and browns but this orange tint to his skin tone would have made the figure sit awkwardly against my background and so I decided to use my own skin tone to mix the flesh colour as  I felt my skin tone would work better in the final painting.

Once I had mixed a light, medium and dark skin colour based on my arm tones,  I painted these three colours onto a piece of paper so I could continually refer back to them with each paint sitting so I had  continuity throughout the painting. 

I used at least three layers on each part of the portrait with each layer adding more drawing corrections, tonal correction, and details

Below are three images taken with my mobile as I painted the portrait section of my painting

Sketching and Blocking in

Here I used a thin mix of Burnt Umber to roughly sketch out the head,and then using my mixed skin tone started to block in tone to start adding form to the painting. 

Refining tone, and fixing drawing

Here I blended the tones out using a nice soft Sable blending brush and started refining the eye socket and nose It was here that I noticed that the head was the incorrect shape and as you see from the back of his neck to the top of his head the curve goes to high and gives him a distorted head shape. 

Finished portrait

As you can see I have fixed the head shape, and added several details like the stubble on his head, veins on his temple and facial hair etc as well as continually changing tones. 

With this piece I wanted it to be strong yet gentle at the same time, the boxer portraying the strength not only because of the nature of the sport of boxing but also because of the sheer physicality of the model. 

But to balance this I believe the pose and expression on his face add a gentleness to the image. 

I was thinking of a suitable title for the image but have decided even with all the fantastic suggestions by my facebook, twitter and Instagram followers I would like the viewer to decide why the boxer is in the position he is and what is running through his mind. And so I decided not to title so It doesn't influence the viewers thought process. 

"Untitled"

40" x 40"

Oil on wooden panel. 

Available at the Darren Baker Gallery London 

0207 580 5332

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