Blue hair against a hot ground was the whole reason for this painting. Kyle sits with a hand raised to shade his eyes, and the light arrives warm enough that the shadows on his face run red rather than grey. I built it in stages, first a single ochre block-in, then the reds worked into the skin, then the hair, and only at the end did the ground go dark so the gold of his shirt could carry the picture. Three small marks sit at his shoulder, a teal square, a red circle and a yellow triangle, and together they spell his full name in Mandarin characters. Eighteen by twenty-four inches in oil, and the first portrait where I trusted colour to do the drawing.