29 FACES DAY 15

Hubert Gizmachi

Do you remember Professor Petrov Gizmachi from yesterday's Day 14 painting for 29 FACES?  Let me introduce you to his son, Hubert, for Day 15.  A true chip off the old block, both in appearance and phenomenal intelligence.

At the age of 16 Hubert is a first-year student at one of England's top universities, and has been picked for their team competing on television's 'University Challenge' programme.

Yesterday's Scribbler face of Professor Petrov inspired me to paint a portrait of his son.  I'm challenging myself to create something in a different way every day, and although I've used the methods separately before, I've never combined them with this approach.

I painted a watercolour background on watercolour paper, sloshing different colours of paint onto the wet page fairly randomly and adding splashes of colour with a toothbrush.  Luckily the orangey paint fitted nicely for where I wanted to paint the hair.  Of course I forgot to take a photograph of the background before I did the next stage.

I painted the outline of his face, his eyes and his lips with acrylic paint, and scrubbed the remnants of mixed paint left on my palette onto the face and hair quite randomly.  The spectacles were painted with a black Pitt Artist's brush pen.  I wanted to leave the rest of the face 'empty' so that the original messy background showed through, as you can see in this close-up.

Here he is again in all his intelligent glory, looking a bit miffed because he would have liked a more traditional portrait.  But I love him.