Skip to main content

The Lady and the Lions

30" x 36", oil on canvas

Rummaging through my old photo reference, I've started developing a series that will take me to some subtly surreal places. New photos will be necessary, but I have literally hundreds of great shots I've taken over the years to choose from. This painting is the first of this new group –I have a few others standing by, eager to be painted– which will have a decidedly strong figurative element.

Here's my friend and frequent model Ashley yet again,* this time superimposed against a statue of a lion I shot in Montreal many years ago. The addition of the lion tattoo (with crown!) during the early sketching/composition phase completes the painting and gives it a nice three-layer depth, visually and conceptually.
Feel free to analyze/interpret it as you will; you'll get now answers from me.

Tight pencils.

I'm still not sure why I take this stage to such a developed level since it's not really necessary to fully render the drawing like this...but it's so much fun!

Roughly halfway through.

I used red and orange for the ground colours on this one –red for the lion because it was going to be predominantly green in the end (you can see a "halo" of red around Ashley's unpainted head above).

I did some tests in Photoshop to determine the colour for the background as well as for her shirt (which was dark blue in the original photo). The shirt was planned to be pure white with just a hint of fabric folds, but my ground colour choice of brown (with a bit of orange showing through above) convinced me to paint it a rich red.


UPDATE:
As of 29 February 2016, this painting has a companion in The Lions and the Lady.



*In fact, the photo reference for this is similar to the one I used for Corona Solis (golf) –except her eyes are open here.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Axel Foley's Chevy Nova (1/25 scale model)

Multiple tributes, here. I remember first seeing  Beverly Hills Cop  on video at my friend Chris K's house, 'cause his family had a VCR and we'd watch tons of movies (and record music videos) together. The summer of 1984 was a special time for us (having created a strong bond in school since Grade 6 a few years before), going on biking adventures around the 'burbs and into the city, etc., and home video played an important role from then until I moved to the opposite end of Scarborough just before we started high school. We liked the movie a lot, both of us fans of Eddie Murphy from his  Saturday Night Live  days. I don't think I'd seen the movie since then (it would have been 1985, probably summer, since the movie came out in late 1984) and I became curious to see if it still held up. It did. It does. I found Murphy as charming as ever and the comedy (and even the action) holds up very well and its very re-watchable and very entertaining.  Beverly Hi

Small Pond Arts Puppet Wagon (1/24 scale model)

I dreamed up the Small Pond Shipyard for my fanciful scratch-built sci-fi airship creations (which still only exist in sketch/Photoshop mock-up form (and boxes in my closet) for now), but more and more ideas kept coming ( this wind turbine , for example, will be part of a rather elaborate diorama I'll be working on this winter). But the Puppet Wagon was a sleeper surprise, to be sure. [Really, though, I don't know why I was so eager to build this right away since I was planning to slowly develop my modelling skills with simpler builds first and the work my way up to more complicated projects.] Not all parts were used/needed. Most of these ideas have come from watching modelling videos online, and when I saw a review of this sweet little Japanese "Ramen Shop" food truck by Aoshima (right-side drive!), my brain started making jokes about customizing it to the weird food truck ideas I'd been posting on Facebook. But the more I thought about what the co

U.S.S. Enterprise, NCC-1701-D (1/1400 scale model)

Seven decades after Kirk. I'd been hooked on Star Trek since I was a wee lad in the 1970s, watching reruns of the original series from the '60s, and I enjoyed the movies that came out afterward. When a new series was announced to debut in 1987, I was excited and interested, even though I felt the subtitle "The Next Generation" was cheesy. Nearly 30 years later, I've definitely gotten used to it (but "TNG" is easier to say and type), but I still find it kinda bland. Anyway, the show had fresh new technology and a spanking new design for its main ship, the U.S.S. Enterprise , NCC-1701-D, now the flagship of the Federation. Andrew Probert 's design took some getting used to for me; it had the same basic elements of the original Enterprise  (saucer, neck, cylinder, and two cylindrical engines on pylons), but the shapes and volumes were distributed differently, weirdly. Everything looked squished and soft. The organic look of this new ship had me