‘Manners and Modes for the Young’ 2020

Ink and acrylic on collage

42 x 30cm

My latest Sky Arts Portrait Artist of The week attempt. This week’s sitter was the hugely funny and entertaining Will Young ? Professional artist this week was the rather brilliant Christian Hook. If it’s still available to watch on the Artist of The Week Facebook page, Christian’s awesome painting of Will is well worth a look at.

As with my previous attempt at this, I opted to just watch the artist painting and to listen to the hugely entertaining conversation between the artist and the sitter. It’s just a really nice way to get to know the sitter a bit more. It’s also a great and rather rare opportunity to see a fellow artist at work. I then created my version a little later, using a few screen-shots that I took of Will during the four hour sitting.

The collage background was mainly taken from an old 1920’s Punch almanac with a few thespian references just for Will. I’ve also used a few old dictionary pages, in my failed attempt at including one of Will’s favourite words. You may need to watch the paint-a-long to remotely understand that reference!


Original artwork and signed prints of this piece are available to purchase via my online shop.


And for anyone interested in exactly how I put this artwork together. Here’s a video of me discussing my process, my ways of working and then some very sped up video film of me completing this from start to finish.