TIM BAKER

Portraits this week was a family affair, with Liz’s two daughters posing, Karen and Charlie who we have painted several times before and works at The Lamb. It was a challenge to draw the younger participants as I’ve not drawn or painted many non-adult portraits. My first attempts during lockdown looked like mini adults! I think I’ve got it now…yes painting children and teenagers is very different.

First Phoebe was up, wearing a colourful sweatshirt and baggy overalls – so after the first ink drawing (below) I had to use a new Inktense paint set* as those bright colours suited her sweatshirt perfectly.

(*Given the financial situation I have banned myself from buying anything except directly needed materials, but along with the Carbon Black ink was an early self-birthday present as I found it cheaply on eBid.

I love Derwent, but highly recommend shopping around online or waiting for sales, don’t buy at the RRP as they are a bit pricey – also I went for set 1, there’s a set 2 on there that’s even cheaper and I prefer the colours, but a few of the selection is ‘lightfast pending‘ on the UK site, and marked as less than 8 on the US site. That said if you avoid ‘Cherry’ with it’s frankly dreadful 4 wool rating, and keep in mind Fuschia is only 6, you’ll be fine.

Reds and yellows are always a pain like that, indeed I had forgotten that the Poppy Red I have in the blocks only scores 7! Or 5 on other charts, did they reformulate it? Blocks and paints apparently have different formulations hence the different ratings…as the blocks seem to be higher, another good reason to use blocks as refills. Note that not all the paints map onto the blocks range, and vice versa).

I am no stranger to Inktense blocks but having a little paint set is far more convenient and I can just cheaply reload them with blocks as needed in future. As you can see from the Ink review post I’ve been already using them on landscapes.

One downside/upside of Inktense is it dries really quickly – so good for quick pieces, especially when the weather is changeable or you are in environments where you might have to move. (USK aka urban sketching in a city you really have to be aware of your surroundings and be able to move in a moment – it’s less the wildlife of a deer kind and more the human sort). But like the paintsticks once it’s dried, that’s it so you need to be quick and bold.

Another is that it dries very matt, unlike watercolour which has sort of ‘glow’ about it. But I think it’s actually more suited to quick portrait work than I thought.

So after Phoebe was her sister Milly and after a rather stressful ink drawing – meant to be a watercolour but the ink blurted from the pen giving her a black eye which I had to fix and meant I really didn’t have time to do anything more than an ink wash piece – I did another Inktense piece which was far better.

Thing about Inktense is it tends to dry lighter, despite being very intense colouring, especially using washes. This I think really works here, the lighter gentler feel, especially as I’m known for going bolder and darker,. I was obsessed with the t-shirt – I don’t know the character but it’s very anime/Pixar/Dreamworks, like a Japanese version of a fox.

After Milly we had Karen post for us…who was drawing for the first time along with us at Portraits At The Pub. I had talked to her about abstract work I do, so it felt the right time to crack out the paint sticks. Not sure about the background, I thought it was a shorter time but it wasn’t, so overworked that. Like how I’ve scratched the check pattern of her dress, that’s very effective.

And finally Charlie posed for us – you can hopefully see what I mean about Inktense vs Watercolour – the watercolour here has a glow that’s hard to reproduce in Inktense. But watercolour does require a lot of faffing and dries slowly…so I might try using more Inktense and see how I go with that. Certainly like oils, watercolour just needs a lot more space and a lot more time.

And one happy thing – I sold a portrait! I bumped into someone at the pub who wanted to buy one of my portraits I did at the pub previously (and I meant to get back to them but I am a terrible salesman) and asked if they still wanted it, and they did. I’m really happy to have my work out in the world…it hasn’t happened often.