Painting Bowie

My mum used to be a massive David Bowie fan, and for her Christmas I decided to paint her a portrait of Bowie – although sadly not from real life. I didn’t want to be too obvious and paint him with his Ziggy face, so I found a great photograph of him from his blonde years, which I can’t for the life of me find now – I printed off a copy and used that for reference.

I grabbed an acrylic board and bought a whole new set of acrylic paints – given the last time I’d used my old set was 10 years ago, they’d all dried up. I also didn’t really know what I was doing so I set out by sketching some outlines, blocking in some shadows and colours, despairing quite a lot, then refining, refining, refining, until I just couldn’t stand to work on it any longer.

Anyway painting below. I actually think it turned out alright.

Bowie – by Seb Charrot, 2015 — 18″ by 14″ acrylics

I also included a gif of various stages of the painting below. You can see how bad my foundations were, so I think I did well to actually save the painting. The turning point was when I fixed the eyes, and it finally stopped looking like a serial killer wearing David Bowie’s face.

Anyway I may try to paint again because it was incredibly rewarding – not least because my mum loved it – but I do have to admit it was a pretty stressful and painful process.

Cheers,

— Seb