F-Block Portrait - TICK!

Regular readers will know this piece has been on the back-burner for much too long. Thankfully the gentleman who commissioned it has bags of patience which can be very rare these days. I eventually completed his son's portrait yesterday with my increasingly invaluable 'Dr P.H Martin Radiant Concentrated Watercolour Inks'. 

Before you ask, no I haven't signed a sponsorship deal with the manufacturers, however they are incredible. If you like strong watercolours buy some now. I glazed the blue shirt in one application and even then it was heavily diluted. The same goes for the mixing desk (bottom right). There is so much potential for wet in wet techniques I'm uncontrollably itching to experiment.

Another revelation yesterday was white graphite paper. I picked up a sheet from work (I moonlight in an art shop but it's only open during the day so I suppose I'm daylighting?) to see if I could transfer white text onto the finished blue shirt. See below for the results.

The transfer was quite strong so I putty rubbered (erased) the text ever so slightly so they blended in better with the lighting and folds of cloth. Another hurdle overcome, the next time I require reams of text on a dark surface I know just the trick.