"Lionesque"

For some reason I christened this blog with the presumptuous title "The Art of Living"... but lately it seems that I've been posting more "living" than "art."  Life, that amazing gift that inspires art in all of us, has kind of kept me tied up lately; and it takes me a prodigious amount of time to get any decent fine art project off the ground.  

But I've finally managed to cough up a painting.  So, without further ado,  

voici my painting!

Yes, I've been into lions lately.  I found this fabulous FREE photo on Pixabay, and set to sketching asap!

I primed my canvas (i.e. painted over a previous flopped painting), and after the paint dried, sketched the nuzzling lions. 

I started the painting process by just blocking in the main colors, then going over them with the details.

Here's a few hours worth of painting...just blocking in and detailing as I go.

Fast forward a couple of days, and (momentous occasion) I'm almost done with the lions' faces!  Here are some close-up shots of how I painted the ears.

Smearing in the basic colors - black for the "deep" center of the ear, and dark reddish brown for the rest of the ear.

I didn't wait for the paint to dry, but took a detail brush and painted in a layer of fine hair.  Over that, I came in with another layer, lighter than the preceding one, to create more depth.

 I applied the same method to the hair of this lion's neck...darker colors for depth, then going over that with layers of lighter paint. (Whoa, check out the dirt underneath my thumbnail!  Embarrassing.)

Another close-up, almost complete.

So, here I gave our lions some legs, and some grass to rest upon. But it still needed a few more touch-ups...

....I used some transparent color washes to even out the tones.  Then I built up the darker and lighter hairs of our big kitties, and gave them whiskers.  To the grass I gave some more shadow, a few more highlights, and my signature (carefully hidden in the bottom right corner).

And I now declare my week long venture complete!  Thanks to my sisters for their invaluable constructive criticism, thanks to Mama and Daddy for their unwavering encouragement, thanks to The Piano Guys for supplying me with plenty of Youtube music while painting...and thanks to you, patient reader, for viewing my rambles!

Yours truly,

Callie