I like going to tournaments and taking photos of tennis players
I will sometimes draw or paint stuff inspired by my own photos
I occasionally make not very professional tennis gifsets
Some stuff to get you started on your own tennis photography journey:
Photographing the Serve: A Spectator's Guide
Leveling Up in Sports Photography: Beyond the Smartphone Camera
Photographing Tennis With A Phone, Part 1: The Basics
Also:
Why I like taking tennis photos so much
Where my blog title comes from
Why candid sports photos are sneakily hard to take
Some thoughts on aging (and being a Novak fan)
If you wish to use any of my photos for blog headers, pfps, or edits, PLEASE credit my blog 🙏 (Please make an effort to include credits for any photos you post or share: photography is hard work and we photographers would always appreciate the recognition!)
PLEASE DO NOT repost my photos on other platforms
PLEASE DO NOT repost or reuse my art for ANY purpose
That distinctive motion you see only on this particular surface: a player rapping their racquet against their upturned sole to dislodge clay, bending their leg like a flamingo's to do so. (Occasionally, on hard court or grass, they'll forget they aren't on clay and do this anyway.)
I finished this back in August 2025 from a photo taken at RG of the same year, but I thought I would share it today in honor of the old man's birthday. 39 years young 🥳👑
Process photos + more yapping under the cut.
Shirt (creases upon creases)
lobster claws hands
When sharing our work, we artists tend to show just the final product, maybe snapshots of a few steps along the way. We tend not to show how things went wrong in the middle, if they did. (Trust me: they go wrong pretty often, at least for me.)
On this one, a lot of things went wrong, and the final result, while I like it now, was far enough away from what I had envisioned that I couldn't look at this piece for months after finishing it. For one: the skin tones were way too red. As in, my man Novak was a lobster being sous-vided on court. This was caused by a combination of things--light reflecting from the clay surface onto him; and my iPhone employing a setting called True Tone which supposedly "automatically adapt[s the] iPhone display based on ambient lighting conditions to make colors appear consistent in different environments." There was nothing to be done about the first: I have to draw what I see in the photo. But the second wreaked havoc. The phone boosted the saturation of the photo, probably while I was working late in the afternoon in declining light. Without it, I would not have gotten the colors this wrong. As it was, I was too focused drawing to step back and realize that his legs were, well, lobster-red. (Needless to say, after realizing my mistake, I went and deactivated True Tone for good.)
Fortunately, I was able to correct the legs so that they didn't quite look as sous-vided. But the clay surface was another matter. While on the rest of the drawing I used my workhorse Unisons, for the clay I was trying out a few sticks of Henri Roché pastels purchased from Paris during my Roland-Garros trip. The House of Roché was founded in 1720; they've been in business since, and they're currently a two-woman team who make, pack, and ship upwards of 2000 different colors of pastels sticks all by themselves. Degas used their pastels back in the day: 'nuff said. They also happen to be, by some margin, the most expensive ones on the market. €20 a stick, folks. By contrast, other professional grade pastels are around $3-$8 a stick.
Naturally, being curious to know what the fuss was all about, I went and bought some sticks in RG colors. I thought to do this drawing specifically to see how Rochés differed from what I had: I would use the Rochés just for the court surface. Well, I learned the difference--to the detriment of the drawing. I thought my Unisons (a top quality pastel, used by many professional pastellists, handmade in England) were vibrant, but next to the Rochés they looked dull and chalky. The Rochés glowed with their own light.
Problem is, the clay surface was supposed to be a dull, pale pink/orange. That is how clay looks under overcast daylight, and, to own the truth, that is how it looked on my phone even with True Tone turned on. Rendered with Rochés, my court was now on fire. And this being pastel not oil painting, there was no way I could cover it up in another layer, scrape down and start over. Not over an area this large.
I won't bore you any further with my travails getting the court texture right. (It looked like a Martian beach volleyball court after my first pass, and I spent a day editing it to look like it was flat even though churned up by footfalls.) Also, look closely at the racquet, and you'll see that the string bed is all wonky: this is what happened when I was trying to get just one more thing done after having already worked on the drawing something like seven hours that day, and decided to eyeball the string pattern instead of using a straight edge and measuring.
I got a lot wrong on this one.
A more disciplined artist would perhaps have thrown the work out and started the whole thing over--or gone for version 2.0 after having finished the first attempt. Certainly, Degas was known to do umpteen iterations of a given image until he found exactly the colors, contours, poses etc he was happy with. I do not have the discipline or the patience for this. I justify my laziness by thinking of the finished, flawed work as a record of my shortcomings as an artist--and as a record of growth, when looked back upon. Once I decide I'm done with something, I never go back to change it, even if there are some pretty bad-looking mistakes in there--because I don't want to think that I was better back then than I actually was.
So, yeah. May I present Novak tapping the clay off his shoe while looking a little sous-vided on a sea of lava, folks. Happy birthday, old man.
📸 purblind-dragon | Roland-Garros 2025, first Tuesday practice | Sony RX10-IV
just curious ....novaks hair is so damn black, how do you get the texture? like do you add blue and purple and white or? im a verrrrry new artist
It depends on the lighting in the reference image (assuming you're working from one), but as you can see from the examples below, there will always be highlights and mid-tones contrasting with the darkest values in his hair. The highlights tend to occur at the crown of his hair, although they can be more extensive, and there is usually the most mid-tone variation at the sides of his hair where it is trimmed short.
Detail of reference image used for this work vs. pastel rendering in progress
Note how the strokes or marks used to render the highlights and mid-tones will suggest not only the hair's texture (coarse or fine, shaped or smoothed with product) but also its structure (which direction it's brushed, if it consists of one large swooping chunk or is divided into several or is haphazard etc). Note also that the colors used to render highlights or mid-tones will differ depending on the lighting in the image. In the example above you can see that the highlights have a greenish tint (less apparent in the pastel than in the photo), while the mid-tones around the sides of his head are a dark olive/moss green. In the example below, the highlights are mostly warm purplish-browns, a bit cooler and bluish in the front where it curves over the forehead; the rest of his hair is extremely dark but there are some lighter, bluish-purple darks on the top of his head.
Detail of reference image vs pastel rendering for this work
So yeah, his hair looks black but in actual fact not much of it is (as the camera perceives it under a light source). And I should also mention that even where it does look pitch black, I never use straight-up black to render it. In both these examples, I used an extremely dark purple, which imo looks more realistic. "Black" comes in many varieties, and even if you're working in a digital medium, you'll get a more interesting, dynamic result using an extremely dark value of a color rather than a pure neutral black.
Tennis players who have won the Laureus World Sportsman of the Year Award:
Roger Federer (5), Rafa Nadal (2), Novak Djokovic (5), Carlos Alcaraz (1, so far)
Artistic question - since you paint him the most , have you become more attuned to painting novak? Like you've developed a shorthand to approaching him ...or do angles and light and pose make it a different process each time? Either way I see how he indirectly led you into this and to have someone be that kind of muse is truly lovely!
Certainly, having drawn/painted him this many times, I no longer have to stop to solve certain artistic problems such as how to capture the rightward sweep of his lego hair over the brow or how to render that light dusting of facial hair on his cheek (but: as soon as I venture into a new medium, such as oil, those problems return with a vengeance). I'm also much more familiar than before with the quirks of his facial features, such as the texture of his eyebrows and the line of his nose--but if the likeness is to turn out correct, I still have to focus to the point that I stop seeing him and am just seeing patches of color. So, in that sense, depicting him isn't much less work than depicting someone I've never drawn or painted before. It just happens to be work I am more willing to undergo, not because it's familiar work but because it's him.
you should get novak to see your stuff online.....idk how😭 tag one of his fanclubs or something.
Yeeeeap this is kind of a "Can an incredibly busy celebrity with millions of followers accidentally locate a needle in a cosmic haystack" situation 💀 Given how socmed algorithms work, the only method I have any faith in is actually bringing the physical piece of art to a tournament and holding it up for him in the autograph line. Which I've managed to do on two occasions, and which imo beats having him see it shrunken on a phone screen.
Sennelier oil pastel on Arches oil paper, 30x19in (76x48cm)
This was a hard piece to photograph; irl the background looks much more saturated. I suspect it's the light reflecting off the wax content of the oil pastels.
Process pics below the cut.
Face, hair
Shirt. (It's black, obviously, but an actual black pastel was used on less than a third of it.)
Legs
This went faster than a soft (dry) pastel piece would have--six days of work all told. One reason is that Sennelier makes only 120 colors in oil pastel, whereas a typical professional soft pastel range will have anywhere between 300-800 colors. Another thing is, in oil pastel, you have to be much more economical about layering, because after about three layers the pastels stop taking; a good sanded paper otoh will accept dozens of layers of dry pastel. So, less time spent color-matching, and less layering.
I go back and forth between loving the medium and being meh about it. I do love how quickly this worked up, how it forced me to forgo sharp edges and tight detail, and how working with far fewer colors still yielded rich chromatic results. I do not love how easily it smears and how easy it is to cross-contaminate colors because of the smearing.
The biggest drawback is that oil pastel never cures/dries. That means either framing the piece under glass, or packing it away under glassine paper. But framing is an arm and a leg, and putting it in a sandwich would probably do things to the impasto texture that are not ideal.
Side view showing impasto texture of work
There is fixative that you can spray on oil pastels to make it at least smudge- and dust-proof, but apparently, it doesn't work if you spray it on right away; you have to wait a few months for the work to set up a bit, then fix. (Those aren't the instructions on the bottle btw; the bottle says nothing about waiting a few months. But if people on the internet are right about having to wait at least three months first, that would explain why the fixative did nothing for this smaller piece I finished first and that I tried fixing right away.)
Apparently, even if you get to the point of being able to finish projects quickly, you still have to learn patience as an artist 😔
"They say [artists] don't even have to be fully sane, that it actually helps if we're a bit peculiar. I disagree of course. When I listen to the mayhem on the news each day, I realize that artists must be among the few truly balanced people on earth." -- Richard Schmid
What a great blog! Fantastic photography and artwork! But why-oh-why pastel ??! It's sssooooo hard to work with. And I simply cannot do realism any more (I paint with oils every 9th year or so...)
Djovak Nokovic (as I like to call him) has been my favorite since 2008 when he won his first slam. He was the unknown from nowhere who had the nerve to beat assumptive champion Jo-Wilfried Tsonga in the final. (And I was never into the Federer-Nadal thing.)
But I will reluctantly admit NoDjo is only my 3rd favorite all-time. #2 is Stephanie (don't call me Steffi) Graf. And my total #1 is Miloslav "The Big Cat" Mecir. But no one can possibly play like he did. (Yeah I'm not young anymore, just immature.)
Have a good life and fine career. Enjoy whatever you do. One-handed-backhands forever!
-mqai
(Sorry, no question there, huh?)
Hey there! Great to hear from a veteran tennis fan and a fellow artist. Mecir was well before my time but ofc I know who he is (Olympic gold medalist and 1989 IW champ!). It's great you're still into the sport--I've only been following since 2019 and this is already about as long as I've been interested continuously in anything, unless you count the subject I spent 15 years studying in school 😅
I've heard a lot of folks say pastel is tough but honestly I find it so much easier than oils or watercolors. No mixing to get the colors you need, it layers nicely if you use the right paper, you can still get fine details with the edges of sticks or with pastel pencils ... it does require a different way of working from other color media, but I like how it frees you to just focus on drawing. Since I haven't been at this art stuff very long I'm still very much in the "Can I draw/paint what I'm seeing" phase of things ... Maybe after another decade or two I'll get tired of this and start going full Matisse or Picasso or even Rothko 😂
It's always a sad day when I have to pack in a pastel. Even if you spray fixative on your work to seal the pastel surface--and I don't, because that often flattens/darkens the colors--the work, being fragile, has to be framed or packed away eventually. And framing a pastel is really expensive.
I've worked out a system for packing away pastel artwork. Anything smallish can go in a plastic envelope with a sheet of glassine paper over it, but for larger works, I make a sandwich out of mat board, which is thick cotton board that is used to mount artwork or photos for framing. The pastel goes in the middle of this sandwich, protected by a sheet of glassine paper.
Since this pastel was really large--45x40in (114x102cm)--making the board sandwich for it was A Thing. Mat board generally comes in sheets 40x32in large; larger sizes like 60x40in or even 72x48, 96x48, 104x60in exist, but Fedex/UPS won't deliver those; they have to come in a truck. That's hundreds of dollars in shipping costs, so instead of shelling out for 60x40s I ordered a bunch of 40x32s, cut a couple in half and taped the halves to the wholes to make larger sheets. I then layered two sheets on top of one another, taping them together around the edges, with the joins in individual sheets on opposite ends so the whole thing wouldn't fold where I'd taped a half sheet to a full sheet.
Multiply that by two, and I have my mat board sandwich. I take one last look at Novak and the ballkid, close the sandwich, then slide it into a massive plastic envelope made out of two 40x30in clear bags.
Every work I pack away like this gets its little label.
Not to be dramatic, but it feels like putting the artwork in a bodybag. I don't know when it'll ever come out of this plastic-wrapped sandwich. Getting it into this sandwich to begin with is such a pain in the ass that I can only foresee taking it out to frame it, for myself or if someone buys it. And when might that be? Who knows.
Daniil and the physio being packed away a couple of years ago. They haven't been out of their plastic-wrapped sandwich since, either.
This is one source of motivation to take on oil painting, which I made some forays into last year. Compared to pastels, oil paintings take much longer to complete and are way fussier; just preparing the painting surface is an absolute headache and can be a months-long process, if you're starting from stretching/mounting and priming the canvas yourself.
But a properly painted oil painting is indestructible. Indeed, you can't put a finished oil painting into a dark closet somewhere; the linseed oil binder used in the paints will turn yellow in the dark. Oil paintings have to stay out in good light; they demand to be in a place where they can be seen.
I have a couple from last year which I haven't shared, but are in my living/art studio area slowly curing before they get varnished (you have to wait 6-12 months after painting them to do that). They're not my best work--I haven't yet gotten the hang of oils the way I feel I've gotten the hang of pastels--but it's definitely nice being able to look at them whenever I want.
So, off I go to take up oil painting again, while Novak and the ballkid go to live--for the time being--in their big sandwich under my bed.
Not exactly related to photography, but what would you say are your most emotional or most special tennis memories ?
My immediate reaction is to think of certain matches and title runs, but as you can probably guess which ones those might be, let me try to be a little more personal and interesting in my reply. I do remember the first time I stepped into a tennis stadium. I hadn't been following tennis for that long, about two years, but still, walking into Arthur Ashe stadium, descending the stands and seeing the players on court, the ESPN box, hearing the score called--it was exhilarating to realize, finally, I am here. I get this feeling every time I step into a tennis stadium I've never been in before, and it's always a moment to savor.
Rome 2022 stands out to me among the tournaments I've attended. It was the first (and thus far only) time I witnessed a Novak title run in person. It was also the first time I got his autograph. There were a few of us hanging around after his R2 match against Aslan Karastev; I had a hot pink tank top that I'd bought that morning in the merch shop, and I dangled that over the side because I had nothing else with me. When Novak got to me, he signed it then looked up at me, as if to ask, "Who is this person asking me to sign a hot pink tank top?" Then he grinned, and I--well, I'm sure I looked pretty comical. I remember walking back along the Tiber to my hotel on clouds; and the whole way all I could see were those huge eyes with their black, spiky lashes (guys, I swear, his lashes are so long they look like falsies).
One day at Wimbledon I sat through three rain delays on one of the outer courts, without an umbrella, because I had a front-row seat and if I left I'd've lost it. The rain was no fun, of course, but it was a memorable experience watching the indefatigable ground crew perform their rain delay routine over and over. I also have many good memories of Indian Wells, my home tournament. In 2021, when the tournament was held in October due to COVID scheduling, it was so sparsely attended you could run into players and have actual conversations with them. In 2022 I saw Rafa Nadal make a run to the final and play an insane 3.5-hr semifinal against an 18-yo Carlos Alcaraz; it was so windy people's napkins got blown onto the court. In 2023, Jannik Sinner was still a well-kept secret; you could just walk into his practices and sit anywhere, and during one of those I exchanged a few words with Darren Cahill, who was every bit as lovely a person as he seems to be. And this year I brought a drawing of Novak that made the man himself laugh.
But who am I kidding: if you're talking about "most emotional" memories, I can't avoid talking about specific matches. Of those I've attended, the standouts are the 2025 AO quarterfinal Novak played against Carlos and this year's AO semifinal against Jannik. I went into both matches pretty calmly resigned to a quick one-way affair, and came out of them in utter disbelief. Both times, I was so wired afterwards I stayed awake all night and watched the sun rise from my hotel room.
"Most emotional" also encompasses bad memories, and of these I'll just mention the 2021 USO final (which, luckily, I did not attend). That was particularly devastating to me because, of course, there seemed to be no way Novak would ever stand upon the brink of history like this again. And yet--two years later he'd come yet again within one match of a CYGS (although, of course, it's rather different when you lose the Wimbledon final and are thus out of the running for a CYGS from that point on). I do think back to this really bad day from time to time, not because I'm a masochist, but because it gives an even greater shine to the joy that has come since, and because it serves as a reminder that one's story (Novak's, mine, yours, everyone's) is never really over till it's over.
