New painting - Lord of the Rainbows

Here's the new picture I've been doing this past week. I like the idea of taking cosy children's book characters or beloved TV puppets and mashing them up with movies. What next I wonder ... Bagpuss as Jabba the Hutt? I was part inspired by some of my previous paintings but also by some doodles I saw a while back by the ever-excellent Warwick Johnson Cadwell, particularly his Rod, Jane and Freddy (and Freddy). I featured his Rainbow doodles on my old blog here.

This is quite a large painting for me being some 4 feet by 3 feet in size. The canvas began life as something quite different, however. It's always bugged me that I cannot get a likeness and, therefore, have never been able to do portraits. So I figured I'd have one last go at it and decided on a self-portrait. Here's how it went. In a word ... badly:

And so, last Sunday, after a last ditch failed attempt to fix it, I gave up. Out came the big brush and the dark lands of Mordor started to emerge from the canvas ...

The fun part is always imagining the shock on people's faces if, in the future, they ever X-ray the painting to reveal the crappy portrait beneath. But it won't be half the shock they'd get if they X-rayed this one I did last year ...