Small portrait of Wilfred ‘Wilf’ Birley Brown. Oil on 9mm birch ply panel with handmade fine marble dust ground.

‘Little Wilf’ is part of a small collection where I de-prioritise the drawing phase with a view to prioritise value and colour when using secondary resources. I want to speed up my drawing and likeness abilities, but believe a solid sense of value and colour is necessary first. I used the grid method to project the image onto the canvas which removed the usual stresses of capturing likeness and then painted ‘between the lines’, as it were. This is by no means an impressionist painting, but I like to think there is an element of the impressionist painterly style to it which I hope to maintain and move forward with.