Dirty Welder Girl

'Dirty Welder Girl' 24"x18" Oil on canvas

A portrait of fellow artist Melanie Davies, an old sculptor friend from way back. She is "dirty" as she had been "metal-bashing" one of her steel sculptures and is covered in steel scale and clouds of soot.

This is actually the second version of a portrait of her. The first iteration, which I painted over a decade ago, was a piece that I had never really been very happy with... so I used that as a starting point and painted another. Luckily I also still have a pile of drawings that I made at the time (although stupidly I did them on thin cheap coloured paper... I'm never going to do that again), so it wasn't too hard revisiting this image.