Acrylic painting FINISHED...

Oftentimes, people ask caricaturists: "Do you do real art?" (The more tactful will say,"Do you do any other kind of art besides caricatures?) I usually say no, that I stay busy with caricature, and besides I love the art form. Once in awhile, I'll venture into other genres, but those projects tend to stay on the back burner...not today, though! 

This is a personal commission that I procrastinated on for a year and a half...

Nekoda's Jungle 24"' x 36" acrylic

It's also the biggest canvas painting I've ever done, with a cast of...many. It's even varnished--that was the only thing I had to buy to get it done. (Some of my acrylic paint tubes are decades old and they are still usable!)

Go backwards in time with me:

The boar and the deer had been added at various visits by my friends Celestia and Marlo.

Above: This is the state it stayed in for a long time....About two weeks ago I decided to finish it---adding butterflies, beetles, a hippo, a panther, a cheetah, a lion, a zebra, a sloth, a gazelle, a hyena, and various flowers. 

More canvases now await me (not this big!)

Progress on my grandson's nursery painting...

After setting this project aside for awhile, (the baby isn't even using his crib yet) I was inspired to get more done on it this week:

Mainly, I worked on the upper third of the canvas, using both brushes and my airbrush. I had gotten stuck on what to do for the sky and distance up to it, but I think I know where I'm heading now. The mountains at the moment are too central, I'll probably add more on either side. Next I will add more animals...gotta get it done before the nursery is occupied!
Here's a link to the previous stages.

More jungle progress...

Neko's jungle is finally starting to be what I envisioned before I started painting...

Back posts on this topic: click here.

Neko's nursery painting progress...

My grandson Nekoda is growing by leaps and bounds, (he's almost 3 months old) and his painting isn't finished yet! An elephant has joined the menagerie, though. :-)

You can see my reference photo on my monitor next to the painting. As the elephant was added quite a while back, now that I look at this photo, I can see the eye placement is too far forward. Sometimes stepping back from a piece for some time gives the artist a fresh perspective.
If you want to see previous stages of this painting, click here.

WIP #4

More loved ones are being added, slowly, to my grandson's nursery painting!

The cats represent myself and my fiance; they're a type of African wildcat called a serval. I thought they were so cute, as we both love cats--and tigers or leopards, etc, just seemed too threatening. The little orange monkey is for the baby's red-headed older brother on his dad's side...I'll add more grandparents, etc. in there soon!

WIP #1
WIP #2
WIP #3

WIP #3

My third work session on the painting yielded a Giraffe for Uncle George and a Meercat for Aunt Madeline.
The 'client' (my grandson Nekoda) is pictured below! :-)

I'm figuring that after the composition gets filled in with other family members, I'll go back and make them more personalized-- with such things as eye color and other little idiosyncracies (but they won't be true caricatures). Then it will be time for lots of exotic plants. So far it's getting rave reviews from the 'people' it's depicting! :-)

I usually listen to music while painting, but today I traded in the Beatles, Queen and Led Zeppelin for ENYA!!!!!

Acrylic WIP, stage 2

Spent some time on it this morning. Mixing colors with paint rather than pencils or pastels has always been a struggle for me, and I also hate that expensive acrylic paint gets wasted! One tube that I opened came streaming out when I only wanted a little, for the Mommy Monkey's lips. So I decided that big blob of alizarin crimson would make some nice foliage...
I am definitely having fun applying said paint once I get the right color.

The box lid holds all the tubes I have to throw out..some of them are decades old!

Acrylic work-in-progress...

I haven't brushed with anything other than digital paint in a very. very long while. Why am I breaking out the old acrylics (some of which have dried up completely) and attempting the biggest canvas I have done since high school?
It's because my new grandson needs something large and colorful to hang next to his crib!!

He has a monkey-themed nursery, so I am going to just develop the composition as it comes. My first idea was a jungle scene with monkey caricatures of everyone in our family...but we'll see if that pans out. Other animals will definitely make an appearance. I decided to share each session's progress here on the blog-- I did the underpainting (below) the other day, and this (above) is as far as I got this afternoon in a couple of hours. The canvas is 24 x 36.
It will be very interesting to see if what I have learned from digital painting carries over to the real-life equivalent!