Social Profiling № 10: Headphone Fun

Well, it has been a while hasn't it? This should come as no surprise to anyone who's been paying attention this year, so instead of prattling on about it I'll just get on with the post.

This is the last of this years Facebook Profile pictures, and given how long it's taken me to get through them this year I don't know if I'll be doing another set.  Certainly not next year, although I might still paint the occasional similar picture just for fun.  If you've no idea what I'm warbling about click here and work from the bottom up - all will be explained.

This latest one was one of the smoothest of the lot.  As a result there aren't all that many images in the following post, which is a shame in a way, but great for me as I've less to write.  Oh, and there's a short tale behind this one too.

So a long time ago I was in a group with a bunch of people (I'm not going into the group itself, that's for another time), ages ranged a bit from about 12 to 18 and I was in the upper end of the range.   The woman, then girl, who this picture was for was a couple of years younger than me, and we got on well as friends.  Fast forward a bit and I left town to go to University and what not, and we fell out of touch.  This happened a lot in those pre-Facebook days, because I am hopeless at staying in touch with people.

Anyway, I was back in my hometown a couple of years ago, out having a few drinks with some friends I had managed to stay in touch with (partly through my brother, who still lives there, and partly through Facebook, which really does have it's uses).  I say "A few drinks," but in actuality I was plastered.  This was a grade A bender that took us half way across town, visiting various pubs along the way, and when the pubs closed we hit the clubs.  Clubs are crap for catching up though, because they're loud, so we moved from one to another in the hopes that one of them would be more suitable for people wishing to continue their drunken slurring at each other.

We ended up at a club that can best be described as somebody's basement.  I'm not kidding here, it was a basement in a house that had at some point years before been converted into a club.  Even though this club had been there since before I could drink (many moons ago), I had somehow never been there.  I'll probably never go again - it's a bloody basement!  Anyway, while drinking up the drink I'd bought so we could get out of there I got a tap on the shoulder and a "Blimey, it is you!" in my ear.

Indeed, it was me, and the speaker was the girl I'd not seen for 20 years, who was now the mum of the boy in the painting you see here.  We traded details, and then after a fairly long chat I staggered out and decided to call it a night.  So, that's why this painting exists, because of a chance encounter in a basement while I was blind drunk at two in the morning.  Crazy days.

Oh, and she's also in a relationship with a bloke I used to work with around the time we knew each other.  Nothing to do with the story, I just thought it was a fun thing to note.

None of this has anything to do with the process of painting the picture, which was fairly unremarkable.  I did it in ArtRage 4, and the only thing of any note was that the Photograph it's based on was black and white, so I had to colour it as I went along, and I tried a new technique at the end to soften the results a little.  The end.