Through the Square Window

Model: Rui Ferreira

There was quite a crowd at this week's session... and it's not hard to see why.

Our model was the glamorously buff Rui Ferreira. Rui is originally from Portugal and is an accomplished artist himself. However, if you were to Google his name, you'd be more likely to find photographs of him erupting out of a pair of speedos rather than pictures of his own artwork...

Speedo Heaven 4024 – Photograph © Jennika Argent – www.jenikka.co.uk

Not only is he impossibly handsome, but he's also annoyingly charming and charismatic. He is a young man with an anachronistic old world 1920s/30s Hollywood glamour. Needless to say he's an extremely popular model on the Nudie Doodle circuit, hence the increased attendance, and many menopausal hearts were set aflutter when he dropped his blue velour towelling robe...

Preparatory Sketches

The pose he was poked into was fairly pedestrian. At first it was Michaelanglo's David, and then it was Michaelanglo's David with his foot arbitrarily placed on a shoddy wooden box.

When I had finished my childish scrawl, I found my mind racing with possibilities as to what I could do with the space under his foot. That rubbish wooden box most certainly had to go. Could I replace it with a decapitated dragon? The snarling snake-wrapped head of Medusa? An extra large Fifa football?

After having spent hours painting the minutiae of a bus interior in the previous session I was totally exhausted and really wanted an easier ride – something really simple – just a block of solid colour if possible. I lazily figured that he could be stepping out of something rather than onto something.

I'd had these fluorescent paints kicking around for months – I'd bought them for Gamma Girl back in November. I'd bought three; green, blue and yellow. I'd tried the green for mutant skin tone but it was really hard to work with – it was so translucent that it was like painting with milk. In the end I just painted over it.

I had another go, this time with the blue, on the background of Gay Jesus, but it was really hard to get it to look even. I totally failed but the end result wasn't too awful.

Third time lucky? Perhaps...

These paints can only be painted on virgin white stock and require multiple coats applied in even brush strokes. I reasoned that if I were to adopt a more builder-and-decorator approach I might get a better result. So, considering my paper as I would a piece of furniture, I masked off the white areas with industrial strength masking tape and slapped on a bucket load of yellow...

Masking Tape Stencil & Underpainting

The other thing about fluorescent paints is that they are impossible to photograph or scan – their luminescence is something that occurs only in the transit from paper to eye. This means two things; firstly, this is an ideal medium for those seeking to explore visual effects that are impossible to recreate in a digital medium, and secondly, when it comes to representing this work in print or online, you're going to have to fake it.

Fluorescent yellow looks like naff beige tope suede when scanned so I've had to give the photos above a tweak to make them look the way they actually do.

Warm Up Sketches: Rui's Gawky Walk