The Longshoreman

I found this guy on Pinterest — black and white, just a profile shot, the kind of image I save into a folder labeled "someday" and mostly never open again. But this one kept nagging at me. Something about the angle of that nose, the set of the jaw under all that beard, made me want to put a brush to it. So I pulled it back out, not for a finished piece exactly, just to practice. That's the thing about working from a B&W photo — there's no color information to lean on, no "correct" answer to copy. Every hue in this painting is one I made up.

Watercolor on 500 series Strathmore

The hair is what hooked me from the start, and it's the first thing I laid down. I worked wet-into-wet for the big shapes — rust, ochre, a deep plum-black — and let them bleed into each other before going back in with a dry brush once things had set up, dragging out those wild individual strands. It's a technique that rewards a little bit of letting go. You can't control every hair, and honestly, you shouldn't try.

The background turned into its own experiment. I wanted something loose and atmospheric behind him, so I let a cool violet wash run down the page and just kept feeding it more water and pigment in spots, letting it pool and separate the way watercolor does when you stop fighting it. Then a few flicks of opaque white for spatter, because every painting needs a little chaos thrown at it near the end.

Funny enough, the jacket is probably my favorite part now, even though it wasn't the plan going in. That olive-gold against the charcoal collar wasn't something I'd decided on ahead of time — it just felt right once the face was down, like the painting was telling me what temperature it wanted to be.

Total invention, start to finish, color-wise. Pinterest gave me the bones; the rest was just me and a palette having a conversation.