London's Burning.

Since I'm not currently working on anything that I've already begun documenting, I dug up some old pieces of paper and some crappy camera phone pictures from a painting that I did of Joe Strummer.
I did this painting about a year ago and it was a commission for a friend.


I decided to use this picture of Joe because of the high contrast. I figured it would be the most easily recognizable picture I could pull off with watercolors.


I always enjoyed the belief that if punk rock had a patron saint, it would be Joe Strummer, so I went for a stained glass/"Saint Joe" kinda thing.

I ran out of tracing paper, so I had to use a roll of exam table paper, which is actually terrible stuff to use in place of tracing paper. I mostly work on paintings around 2 or 3 in the morning, so I usually end up having to use whatever is at my immediate disposal.



I sketched my initial thoughts here, then got the idea to include his Fender. The problem being that the composition of the reference photo only allowed me to place is as if he were left handed. We all know that's not right, so I made the decision to flip the portrait over, so the guitar would be facing the correct way.

Of course, that meant that I had to paint the portrait backwards. Dumb idea.
In hindsight, I could have easily flipped the picture in a photo editing program, but apparently, I like to do things the hard way. This added countless hours to the painting.
(I find this approach is great when you want make people think that you possess wizard-like art skills....when, in reality, you're just lazy or too stupid to do it the easy way.)

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So, here is the flipped sketch with some lettering added on. I drew the Olde English on freehand, which was grueling. I don't have a photocopier or scanner at my house, so I couldn't photocopy the lettering to the size I needed to trace. It was much harder than I expected.

At this time, I decided that I would ONLY listen to The Clash while I was painting. I thought it might help the spirit of the piece or some other art fag sounding type of thing.
I raged to so much Clash. It was awesome.



After lightly sketching the basics on with pencil, here's the first bit of the portrait taking shape, before I outlined the rest of the painting.



Here's the almost-finished portrait with most of the rest outlined. Perhaps 7 or 8 hours of drawing/painting at this point.
I normally don't work this "loose", so it was nerve wracking to just paint blind (and backwards). I had not planned out colors, how to pull off the stained glass effect or anything else, for that matter.




and the finished product.

It's like 16x24 and half inches, or some equally difficult to frame size. I think about 15 to 17 hours of painting time. I was in slow motion for this one.