I Took on an Impossible Painting Deadline

This is a brand new painting that I have just finished and I'm a professional artist but this painting made me want to quit. I wanted to challenge myself to complete an intense high contrast wildlife portrait in just two days aiming for a glowing backlit lion emerging from almost complete darkness. It started out like any regular studio day. I had the composition worked out already from my iPad and I transferred everything that I needed onto the canvas with a pencil. The vision was really simple. I was inspired by candles that I had at my recent birthday and I wanted to create this warm fiery underglow to sculpt the lion's mane and its face against a really deep dark and moody atmosphere. And in the first hour the line work and those basic tonal maps felt great. But when you're working with acrylics, especially under a tight deadline, the background can easily make or break the entire piece. My initial plan was to just go with a completely black background and have the lion emitting almost like a soft glow like the candles but there was just too much empty space around the lion. So I had to come up with a new plan and this one wasn't going to be easy. I first started by blocking in the colours with some thin washes before moving on to the actual darkest darks of the background. But here's where the trouble began. Instead of gently building up the atmospheric layers around the lion's silhouette I rushed coverage and essentially over darkened all of the edges. And that meant I was going to struggle getting that glow that I wanted. But I pushed that to the back of my mind for the moment and started to block in the lion. And it's just basically a thin wash of acrylic paint so that I get a rough idea of the colours that this lion is going to actually be. I did this because I needed to wait for that initial background layer to dry before I needed to decide how I was going to carry on with it and try and make it better. But I ran into another problem. Because the acrylics dried so quickly the background very rapidly turned into a flat muddy wall rather than that soft luminous cloud-like smoke that I wanted. I tried pushing forward by blocking in the stones, getting the mid-tones in the body and adding a little bit more of a fiery sort of look to the background. Hoping that eventually the contrasts would sort of balance out naturally. But as I painted with the acrylics everything just seemed to go darker and darker. And the more lifeless the entire thing started to look. And by hour eight I was feeling pretty tired and I could tell I was just fighting the paint instead of actually making any good progress. And then I made the snap decision to completely paint over the background and try and And that was a huge mistake. It lost all of its life. I wanted this powerful, moody, atmospheric sky that almost felt like fire emitting from the lion. And I just ended up with this dull grey mess. Honestly so far not really feeling it. I hate it actually at the moment. This background, this sky is so far off. I just don't know how I'm gonna make it any better other than just repainting it all completely. Which is probably gonna take me another day. Which means I'm really really running out of time with this piece. But it's too late to carry on painting now. I absolutely need to get some sleep and hopefully I'll come back fresh and I'll make a good start and create something that I'm actually proud of. I was in a little bit of a dark place yesterday but I'm feeling much better now. Turns out I just needed to eat a little bit and have a little bit of a sleep. After stepping away and sleeping on it I returned on day two with a much clearer head. So there's a lot of work but I'm feeling a little bit more positive with it today. So it's just about blocking in this lion and then I'll see where I'm at from there with what I do with the background. I know it definitely needs changing but I'm not sure exactly how just yet. So I'm gonna get this lion in and then figure things out as I go. Sometimes you get a bit down when you're looking at one of your paintings. It happens because you're putting everything you have into what you're doing. Plus it doesn't help that I've given myself a deadline to complete this painting. Which means every brush stroke matters and every second counts. The block-in for the lion went really smoothly. Everything seemed to be working relatively okay. Until I realised what time it was. Day two was pretty much over and I got nowhere near as much done as I needed to. Okay it's a brand new day and here's where we're at so far. I've got most of the lion's head blocked in. I did the eyes yesterday. I've still got some more on the mane to work with but I think once I added those eyes I hit a little bit of a turning point with this painting and I am significantly happier with it now. The only thing is I only gave myself two days to finish this painting and I'm now getting into the third day. Which means I've really, really got to get a move on otherwise I'm just not going to get this finished in time. I've only got about five hours left to get as much of this done otherwise I'm going to have failed with what I needed to do and that's a big problem. Thankfully though I can save time and I'm using acrylics and I'm not going to hopefully have to remix all of my colours because I covered my palette in cling film last night or cellophane if you're in the US and hopefully that's going to have kept all of those colours lovely and wet ready for me to use today and it looks like we're all good. So I'm a little bit behind but at least those colours are mixed and really as long as I get this piece done within five hours now I'll still meet my deadline. 10 minutes in and I've already made a mistake. It's not a huge mistake so I can fix it but I've just made this a little bit too cool for the rest of the painting. Like if you look here it really, really stands out quite a lot against the warm colours of the fur. It's just too blue but I can fix that and I'll fix it a little bit later on. For now I'm going to get the nose in and try and get these ears in and create a little bit more of a finished painting. With just over four hours remaining I needed to get a move on. There was still so much to do. I mean the face wasn't even finished yet let alone the mane and that glow that I wanted to achieve. It didn't help that I still needed to fix problems that I'd made earlier. Remember how I said I was going to change this bit to warm it up a little bit? Well I'm going to do that by glazing some very, very thin washes of slightly warmer colours over the top. Only a little bit. I don't need to go overboard and I also kind of want to make this not just feel like backlighting. I want it to feel like it's actually emitting light so I'm actually going to get some of those brighter colours, those more saturated colours, just kind of hitting towards the edge of this muzzle. Does it get a little bit of that glow? Now it's time for one of the biggest changes and this is where it could go horribly, horribly wrong. I'm going to try and add the glow around the mane and this is either going to pull this lion forward and create something majestic or this is going to make it look a lot like a cartoon and I don't want that. This is actually a relatively straightforward process and you've seen me do it already. I'm just taking very, very thin washes of yellow and I'm just going to cover pretty much all of these lighter areas and because I'm using such thin washes and I want a little bit of a glow or a halo around the lion, it doesn't matter if it goes onto the background. It's actually quite a nice effect. Creating the glow around the lion just seemed to work perfectly. Sure, it took a few layers but everything seemed to be going so well but I knew it was too easy because then I made a stupid mistake that I don't know why I did it. I have impulsively done something that may have completely ruined the painting and I'm not sure how I'm going to fix this yet. I had an idea of what I was doing and I just got a little bit carried away and now it looks like this, which I am absolutely not happy with at all. I was trying to make it a bit brighter down at the bottom, a bit more like this glow in the background because it was just a bit dull but I've made it brighter and even though there's no colour on here yet, I think the made this lion's head stand out was it was so bright against the dark background and because I've brightened it up, I just don't think that lion is going to sit as far forwards anymore and it's not going to glow as much and that could be a massive problem. I might have to repaint the now and all of this edge as well to get that soft look where they sort of like interconnect so I could have just added two hours of work onto my already limited time. I've got about three hours left to get this done and honestly I don't know if I'm going to get it finished in time for the end of this video. So I'm actually much happier with this background now. It's not a hundred percent of the way there but it's getting close. I didn't actually manage to film the process of doing this because my camera died and I didn't realise so I managed to glaze some of it back and then darken some of the bits and yeah I'm much happier with how it looks now. I wanted that sort of like, is it dark stormy evening clouds or is it fire coming from the lion's mane? So it's like a cross between the two is where I was going for with this. Now I've just got the next hardest part which is the paws and the dreaded rocks. The worst part of any painting because I hate painting them. I'm normally pretty good at painting paws because they're not normally one of the main focal points of a painting but for this one these paws need to be rendered in just the same way as the face because I want these to be the secondary focal point. So there's a lot of work that's going to have to go into those paws. Other than the final details in the rocks, the paws were the last major hurdle of this painting and it was difficult because my reference photo had these flat looking paws and I wanted to try and get them to look lit up and try to get them to match the lighting of the rest of the lion, especially that really nice yellowy glow. And the paws are in and I think really now all that's left to do is add some darks and some highlights onto these rocks and just a few little leaves and twigs here and there to finish this painting off. I'm very much nearing the finish line so I've got to get a move on and hopefully I'll get this done in time. Down to the final 30 minutes. I mixed up my colours and tried to carve sharp edges and highlights across the stone surface, hopefully tying the whole scene together. I wanted to add some of that orange from the sky and I think it worked really well on the rocks, giving them a nice almost fiery rusty glow. This piece was just one of those paintings where everything seemed to go wrong. I hit ugly stage after ugly stage and felt like giving up because that would have been the easiest option. But pushing through that frustration and working on the painting step by step is where the magic happens. I'm so glad that I didn't quit.