What I felt inspired me to begin my recently completed piece that I have entitled 'Inside' - an acrylic painting of a lion on a standard A3 piece of paper. I stained the paper with coffee and tea and once it had dried, I drew the outline of a lion within a couple of days of having thought of the idea. However, I didn't touch it until under a year later. I was scared of screwing it up and of possibly being unable to bring the vision I had to life on the page that lay before me.
I got caught up in the busyness that was my second year of university so I shelved 'Inside' along with the majority of my creative pursuits until very recently. After finding myself to be exhausted by academics to a point of intense unhappiness and complete deficit of motivation, I decided to do some work for the soul and get out my art box once again.
I had drawn the complete outline of the lion in pencil so I had a considerable amount of anxiety about having to throw paint all over it (thereby having to completely remove my initial and only guidelines for the outcome of this piece which, needless to say, kind of freaked me out). There wasn't really a way around it of course seeing as it was the only way I would get any closer to finishing the piece that had been collecting dust at the bottom of my art box for the past 10 or 11 months. I originally planned to simply re-draw the silhouette over the colour layers before the final stage however, the acrylic dried with an incredibly smooth and glossy finish which made it pretty much impossible to execute my original plan without damaging the progress I had made thus far. Luckily I figured out a way, using a 6B pencil and preschool-level colouring skills, to imprint the outline on the new surface I had to work with.
Then came the tough part - the difficulty came mostly from having to do fine detail. I suppose it was probably just more time-consuming than it was difficult... so naturally patience was required (just FYI - I am probably one of the most impatient people on the planet and being an amateur artist and a writer with that specific character trait is not necessarily the best thing).
Anyway, without any further ado here is a sequence of photos showing the journey and phases of my most recent piece, "Inside". I went through a lot of change, introspection and what I believe to be personal growth over the last year and this piece could quite possibly have been, in part, a catalyst for all of that. So here it is - hope you dig it.
