As a rule everything starts with a pencil sketch and develops from there but it's easy to find yourself repeating familiar patterns. As an exercise in breaking new ground, this image started by composing simple shapes, working in greyscale to establish tonal values. Once I had a composition I was happy with I then added colours and texture. Trying out different hues and saturation values until the whole felt balanced.
Not a consciously made illustration but something that more or less grew out of idle drawing. I can only conclude it's some kind of reaction to listening to too many news broadcasts - it's been a terrible year across the world, dark forces gaining ground.
Faces, portraits, head and shoulders are endlessly compelling but don't crop up too often as subject matter for the commissioned works I receive, so I tend to work on them in my own time. There is so much scope in the abstracting of shapes and features while still retaining the sense of a character. This imagined portrait image developed from a simple pencil outline of a face and evolved into a more mask-like interpretation with echoes of an actor on stage.
