Dean Harkness Art

18/01/2026

Go figure.

16/01/2026

16/01/2026

It goes something like this:

15/01/2026

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14/01/2026

You come out of a Lucian Freud exhibition feeling how you would expect you would feel after seeing a Francis Bacon exhibition which interestingly doesn't have the same effect.

14/01/2026

Gia ~ Terracotta clay

14/01/2026

Taking pics to use as source material for portraits.
I think artist can often seem self obssessed by painting numerous self portraits, and while there is innevitably some truth to the accusation it isn't self obssession that is the primary driving force necessarily, but often times just the lack of an alternative model.

In the end the only thing that really matters is lighting... and composition... but mostly lighting.

05/01/2026

Sadly I have reached the abandon it and start again stage. I did some measuring and made some major changes but the inaccuracies are still so great that I think it best to stop now. Bu**er!

05/01/2026

How (not) to paint a portrait... maybe.

I often have a chaotic approach to making art. I never wanted to be tied down to rules and methods, techniques and processess. But rather I wanted an organic experience where the image just kind of appears.

Well, good luck with that!

In the end one must learn the rules, methods, techniques etc. in order to be able to break free of them.
How (not) to paint a portrait... maybe.

I’ve kind of come at it in reverse which is why, for me, it has been a very slow process of learning how to draw and paint. And what I mean by that is that I have never really committed to learning the methods and techniques that have been developed over the centuries but have relied more on dabbling and playing, and in so doing, and like many other artists, I rediscovered some of those processes for myself.

In this video example you might notice that I do, just a few times, use a proportional divider to check the position and size of things, and a colour checker (as invented by Mark Carder of DrawMixPaint).

But I used neither of those things anywhere near enough in order to get really good results. It is usually somewhere around this stage that I either abadon the work completely, or start again doing more measuring, or even use tracing or a projector (though I try to avoid that as much as possible as it is lazy and tends not to produce very interesting works. However, through experience and luck I may have got away with it and will be able to continue working on this self portrait so long as I am prepared to make some farely major corrections.

Scaling up from an A4 photo to A3.

03/01/2026

How not to paint a portrait.

I often have a chaotic approach to making art. I never wanted to be tied down to rules and methods, techniques and processess. But rather I wanted an organic experience where the image just kind of appears.

Well, good luck with that!

In the end one must learn the rules, methods, techniques etc. in order to be able to break free of them.

I've kind of come at it in reverse which is why, for me, it has been a very slow process of learning how to draw and paint.

In this example you might notice that I do, just a few times, use a proportional divider to check the position and size of things, and a colour checker (as invented by Mark Carder of DrawMixPaint).

But I used neither of those things anywhere near enough in order to get really good results. However, through experience and luck I may have got away with it and will be able to continue working on this self portrait.

Scaling up from an A4 photo to A3.