I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised to encounter trouble once I ventured outside my color comfort zone. Purple, red, and orange: what was I thinking? Well, I really like red-violet, so why not play with that? It was a good thought, and in the end turned out OK.
But I encountered problem after problem along the way.
What I had in mind was a tiger portrait with a crown of lotus. I usually don’t paint the exotic animals from Africa and Asia, but tigers are truly beautiful and I couldn’t resist forever. I intend to work with this theme in several different ways - a series, I guess.
What I wanted to do here was add the mystery of the night sky along with the bright luxuriant colors of the tiger and flowers.
To add interest, I began with a collage of black and white, hoping that some of it would show through and add interest to the background. Once I covered it with the intense color that I wanted, though, very little of the collage showed through. Still, I’m glad that I did it because I think it adds at least a little something.
The tiger was pretty straightforward. So far, so good, except that I thought maybe I should have made him a little larger.
Then for the lotus flowers. They weren’t hard to paint, but standing back, I saw something that was very wrong. The flowers were way too prominent. Maybe they were too big, or maybe they seemed so because the tiger was too small. Either way, I had a problem that didn’t suggest an easy solution.
What to do?
I’ve learned that solutions rashly applied can make the initial problem even worse, so I decided to sleep on it. As it turned out, I set the project aside for a few days. I was reluctant to go back to it. I’d like to say I finally gathered my courage, but it was resolve more than courage.
The fact that some of the lotus petals were showing their outsides while others were showing their insides gave me my solution. I washed them with Indigo then, while the paint was still wet, wiped it away from the petals showing their outsides. The outsides of the petal tended to face downwards, in contrast with the petals whose insides were showing—which tended to face upwards.
This small change made a big difference. The flowers were no longer so dominant; they had more depth; the inside vs outside petals created a subtle boundary between the darker upper part of the piece and the brighter lower part. But most of all, I think those flowers really glow.
By the way, the tiger’s eyes are blue. Some baby animals have blue eyes and tigers may be in that group. But this tiger isn’t a baby. Sometimes, I use blue eyes in animals for a touch of the mystical.
The scrollwork was the most fun, and I really like the touches of green!
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Love your beautiful bunny. We feed carrots to 3 wild bunnies every morning walking to our neighborhood gym. We named them JJR- (Jacqueline Jack Rabbit), Hop A Long, and Hippity. We love nature and all creatures. I love all your animal art.. You are an amazing artist.