The mane event - lion in soft pastels on black paper

This is the latest pastel painting I did. Array of soft pastels on black Canson Mi-Teintes Touch paper (this is a sanded paper, not the regular Mi-Teintes).

Actually, I'd intended for this to be part of an animal series on black paper, so I didn't plan on writing a post until all were done, but this painting took so many turns to get here and I wanted to give up at many junctures. Since there were so many learning points, I thought it would be worthwhile to blog about it, if only to remind myself in the future how a painting can be saved.

This was the reference photo from Pixabay:

I wanted to try black paper because I think it makes the subject pop and has the added advantage of being a great contrasting background without having to do anything. 

It started easily enough - rough sketch and PanPastels to block in the colours. I chose to have a blue underpainting just for drama and I loved the PanPastel effect. It took only 10 minutes but showed starkly all the highlights and shadows. It reminded me of a Lion King poster.

And then, everything kinda went downhill when I added the colour. I tried to use a combination of yellows, oranges and reds, but it looked too monochrome. Added to that, the mane looked stringy, like the poor lion was in desperate need of some hair volumiser. He looked like a sad cartoon character.

So I thought, I would add blue to give more colour interest. so I did. But the darks just wouldn't show up, and the lights wouldn't pop. It was frustrating and was one of the many points in this painting I thought I would call it quits. 

I was puzzled as to why I kept trying to add brighter and brighter yellows, yet the colours looked muddy and stale. At first, I thought perhaps it was the black paper that was somehow sucking up the colour. Then a lightbulb moment - it was the fixative! I would spray the Spectrafix occasionally so that I could get more layers of pastels on the paper. But what happens when you spray fixative is that it dulls the pigment - very significantly. I would spray, go away for a bit and come back to find that my highlights had mysteriously melted. Bah.

"I look like I need a shower!"

Can you see how scraggly and murky the lion looked at this stage? I seriously thought it was destined for the bin. After looking at the painting more critically (and 63 more thoughts of giving up), I realised that the lion was still looking very uniform in terms of the colour distribution, and the contrast in value was not sufficient. I think God must have taken pity on me and gave me the brainwave to change the colour scheme - I made the decision to have the right portion in predominantly blue and the left in yellow/orange. 

The next portion encompassed many hours of rework. Unfortunately, I forgot to take photos of each stage, so I can only describe all the steps I took. I added to the mane, brightened the highlights and deepened the shadows. 

By this time, the paper was pretty saturated and I had to wrestle with being able to pile on more layers of pastels, so it was an ongoing experiment trying to see which pastel could layer well. For the shadows, the dark NuPastel blue and Koh-I-Noor brown seemed to work, without making things even muddier than they already were. The highlight shades were challenging. Schmincke did work to some extent but they went on patchy (I find this to be consistently so when trying to use Schmincke on already saturated paper). Unison and Mungyo layered very well, but they weren't as bright. In the end, the Sennelier highlight tints worked best (also patchy but not as bad as Schmincke).

And this is the final painting, which I'm quite amazed by, as I honestly didn't think it could be saved, let alone end up as something that I love. I think the decision to split the lion into two colours was a good one - it gives the painting so much more interest and adds to the contrast. It's a good reminder to myself that sometimes, I just need to walk away from a painting for a while and see it with fresh eyes later.

So glad you were saved, Simba.