Mathew

 

So this is a digital portrait of my brother Mathew I did for a recent show in Falmouth. When it comes to portraits I generally tend to operate in a shady legal area of image copyrights. I freezeframe videos and make composites of faces that I subtly adjust in the hope that this means I won't be sued by someone with way more money than me. I'm not really sure exactly what I'm doing, but I'm also pretty sure that I'm so far off Woody Allen and Gene Wilder's radars that no-one really cares about it either... So I guess it's fine. For this one though, I thought that maybe I would need a source image that I completely owned the rights to.

So, seeing as my flatmate/brother was right there on the sofa when I needed a subject and he's the vainest person I have ever met (we have three full length mirrors in our flat on his insistence), we were both happy for me to take a bunch of photos of him pulling stupid faces while I shouted things like "Give me an angry sadness!" and "NO! That's fear - I want panic!"

When I had a whole load of ridiculous photographs of him screaming and looking increasingly pissed off (he was in the middle of eating a plate of fish fingers when I co-opted him) I went through them one-by-one and picked the one he liked the least because he's my brother and this would annoy him.

Halfway through my drawing he decided he was unsatisfied with the unflattering nature of my interpretation of his features and withdrew permission for me to use his image. But he is considerably less powerful than David Bowie (my other choice for a subject) so I pressed ahead regardless.

And just as an extra really fun thing this week I've included the steps along the way that led to the final image.

As per usual the black-and-white image looks just-as-good-as or better-than the final thing that I spent eight-hours-and-twenty minutes colouring (I logged them). I could have probably left it at the second stage with just the plain block colours too. But I wanted to hurt myself.

 
It was at around this third image that I realised I'd overcomplicated things unnecessarily and this was going to take me longer than I originally intended.

And then I all but got rid of the crazy green skin tone that was my favourite thing all the way through for image five. There's probably about two hours work or so between the images above. Which was almost definitely a complete waste of time because they look pretty-much identical.