ANDY GARCIA- MODIGLIANI

This blog is actually a continuation of the Egyptian Larva blog I posted previously. (You can click here if you want to refer back to that blog and the the working process I use:
.http://vozwords.blogspot.com/2013/06/egyptian-larva.html  )
With this painting I tried using my normal techniques, but switching the order just slightly to eliminate a bit of the the opacity the final color is creating on the tonal underpainting.

As I usually do, I gathered what reference I need and created a rough of my planned illustration and then took that to a tight pencil drawing.

 

After this I added on a quick wash of watercolor so that I'd have something to work against while applying a line drawing of acrylic paint.

Normally I would do a completely finished tonal drawing and apply color over the top of that. But I find that depending on how much color is being used the underpainting loses a good bit of its impact. To avoid that I didn't try and take the tonal painting any further than this, but added in the tone where it was needed when I added the acrylic colors to the painting. The final effect then tends avoid the muddiness than can happen with overworking.

(The original photo of Modigliani. Below right is a publicity still of Andy Garcia for the film. Below left is the Modigliani painting Woman in a Brown Dress.

Copying the works of less representative artists I've found is an excellent exercise. In the process you begin to understand that what they are doing is much more complicated that it looks at first glance. And it's a nice counterpoint to the realism I'm usually attempting in the work.

 

The Andy Garcia portrait, from the biopic he did on Modigliani,  was done as a thank you gift for the sweet woman Helen who runs the lab where I get bloodwork done. Mr. Garcia is her favorite actor and Helen reminded me a bit of the woman in the Brown Dress. As some of you might well have discovered over the years, there is no such thing as a hard and fast price for any health services. Helen has always made sure that I get the maximum discounts. I often refer to my illustrations as my health care plan. I don't think that there is a doctor that I see (and as you get a bit older you see more and more) that hasn't had one of my paintings presented to them. They seem to remember me and make sure I'm well taken care of.

 

The above were for my cardiologist, dermatologist and back specialist.

Here's a quick preview of the re-issue of the Off-Castes series I did back in the 90's. It will be one of the digital books that Asylum Press will have online sometime in the next few months.This was one of the few times I got to do a finished coloring job over my work, and I was pretty disappointed in the result. Part of it was my own ignorance and ineptness handling the color; another problem was the method Epic asked me to use. I was applying watercolor on what were basically xeroxes of the artwork. Since I was doing the work on Craftint boards (which creates a dark and light line pattern for tone) the linework turned out very spotty with the xeroxes and the watercolor muddied them even further. I rescanned the originals and have been coloring them digitally with much better results.