As You Were – A Liam Gallagher Portrait
I’ve been watching a lot of artists on YouTube recently who have convinced me to purchase some watercolour paper that I have never used before, the Fabriano Artistico watercolour paper Hot Pressed. I’ve been a longtime user of Arches Hot Pressed watercolour paper which is more ivory in colour. It’s an excellent paper especially when I add coloured pencil on top of my watercolour paintings but I’ve been looking for something closer to white for a long time. So after watching numerous videos I treated myself to a block from Jackson’s Art.
A few days after the paper arrived, Oasis announced their reunion and plans to perform in 2025. Perfect, why not have a crack at painting Liam Gallagher on the new paper (not before wasting hours in an online queue and ending up with no tickets, but the less said about that the better).
I’d also recently picked up the Winsor & Newton Artists’ Professional Water Colour Lightweight Metal Box 24 Half Pan Set from eBay for a really good price so I was looking forward to using them. Coupled with some new Derwent Lightfast pencils I had for my birthday I was excited to get started.
After I was happy with the outlines and drawing of the portrait I transferred it to the paper and got started with the watercolour washes. As ever, the paint is really nice to work with and a little goes a long way as it is so heavily pigmented.
A favourite part of the process is when I start to refine the portrait, using coloured pencils to introduce details around key features of the face.
Tools — Faber-Castell Polychromos & Derwent Lightfast pencils
Trust the process.
As a portrait artist there are lots of occasions where you question what you are making and you’re constantly asking yourself ‘Have I got a likeness?’. It’s not a quick process and it’s that moment where the face starts to jump off the paper that you can start to relax a little and enjoy the flow. It’s taken a number of years but it’s all part of the journey.
If you’d like to see a video of this portrait process you can watch this Reel on my Instagram feed. Don’t forget to drop a Like or a Comment, it would be greatly appreciated.
