After creating The Striding Elephant, I thought it was time to have another go at painting an animal. The savannah, and African plains, seem to be a recurring theme with the animal creations, doesn’t it?
Anyway, an update on where we are in the pandemic response that kick-started this hobby. Well, at the time of creating this piece, August 2021, the coronavirus pandemic restrictions had been lifted across the UK with the only aspect of the restrictions remaining being that a face-covering was recommended in crowded places. The case numbers for the pandemic, and other data like hospitalisations, intensive care bed occupancy, and mortality, were all at what was deemed to be a low level in comparison to the peaks seen in March 2020 and January 2021.
Looking back, it’s nice to know that the hobby of painting and creating artworks has continued beyond the lockdowns of the coronavirus pandemics.
Back to The Beast of the Savannah, as mentioned earlier and as you can see in the posts previous to this one, animal creations haven’t been a frequent occurrence. However, blending paints to achieve different colours and shades was becoming a more acquired skill, painting a lion seemed to be a good choice for a creation: something not too complex but gives a bit of a challenge.
Also, for this creation, investment had been made into art palette knives which allow different shapes, textures and styles to be achieved – different aspects that an ordinary brush isn’t able to do as well.
The palette knives were used in this creation to get the texture for the grassland in the foreground, displaying the single blades of grass. The savannah is subject to two seasons, the wet season and the dry season. The two seasons provide a period of lush deep green grass and a period of more dusty and dried grass. This creation is a mix of the two with the sandy base ground being visible.
The palette knives were also used to create a wind-blown effect on the lion’s mane, a new technique that was tried with this creation.
The clouds in the creation were also produced using the palette knives, however, the desired texture for the clouds wasn’t achieved on this occasion. This was something to develop when working on new creations.
This blog post is available in audio as a podcast and can be found here: The Beast of the Savannah audio
Artwork in Progress 