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Alan Partridge

Alan Partridge—a cyanotype experiment.

What I did was cut out various Alan Partridge shapes. The hair, jacket and tie use tracing paper, and the face and shirt are from thick (300g) paper. Over the hair shape I put some extra slices of paper, and on the glass that holds the whole thing down, I drew lines in the hair, the edge of the lapels, and over the tie.

The thick paper blocks almost all the light, but some gets through with the tracing paper, so you can build up tones in the image. On the best version, I then drew in Alan’s facial features with gel pen, biro and pencil.

Based on a screenshot from ‘This Time with Alan Partridge’.

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Ballpoint pen portraits

I’ve wanted to draw something with a Bic biro for ages—that indigo blue kills me. Then I found that spraying a bit of isopropanol makes the ink run, and you get this great watery effect. (Though it seems to be only the magenta pigment that runs. The cyan doesn’t seem to run much).

Drawn on 300g brilliant white Clairalfa inkjet paper.

The Bob Mortimer was the first I tried this way. It looks OK… but there are probably too many lines going on.

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Bristol mugs

Portraits from police press releases. These 32 portraits are a follow-on to my ‘Somerset drug dealers‘ collection from 2017. What is it about these faces? They completely fascinate me. Some are defiant, some are defeated—but no one’s really posing. There’s something completely real about them. In the age of mugging for a profile picture, these have to be the polar opposite. (Drawn with Kyle brushes).