Client asked for blue jacket and red trousers with a gold stripe. The longer this combination went on for, the more it looked to me like the sort of thing dictators in South America (or a Gaddafi/Idi Amin type) would wear. So in my head he became the Supreme Generalissimo for the duration of the painting.
The camera - or more likely, me - struggled to get both the blue and the red saturated at the same time so you'll have to use a little imagination. Getting this scheme to balance was something of a challenge. There's three saturated primary colours here. Mercifully he'd asked for the gold stripe on the trouser leg which helped a lot. Played with a number of options for things like the cuff colours - seriously, nothing else but blue with a thin gold stripe worked there - and the shirt. The shirt was a real problem. Tried white - way too bright and called attention to the wrong part of the model; grey - looked unpainted; and a pastel blue - nope; before realising I was going the wrong way and tried a military khaki. Perfect. It disappears into the busy scheme and reinforces the soldier-inside-the-dandy look that we have going on.
Another thing that I found fun was making his very, very strange haircut work. Largely through making sure that I treated the shorn back of his head in the same way you would stubble. That is: thin washes of a skin-black-brown-grey mix and then rehighlighting with very thin skin tone. Seemed to work nicely. Happy with how he turned out and he's wildly different to his more, shall we say Hugo Boss German looking counterpart. Fun project. More shinies soon.
TTFN
Great treatment of the hair cut ! The symbol on the armband has faded into the background - might just be the photos (?)
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