I had wanted to redo this acrylic painting which I originally completed some years ago and also as I needed to submit a suitable wildlife painting for the National Exhibition of Wildlife Art. It's been a few years since I have entered a wildlife painting as livestock falls in to the domestic category and is therefore ineligible. At the time of the original painting, aware that I invariably worked from a darker palette I decided to make an effort to paint a light background. It seemed okay at the time although I was never really happy with it so I thought I'd give it a completely different feel and repaint it in oil instead. I mixed up a dark green background colour of acrylic to cover quickly and began to obliterate the background. As I was now at the point of no return I decided to photograph it and chart it's progress which you will see below.
Inspired by the dramatic change to the background I sloshed quite a bit of a mix of generally dark acrylic to the foreground obliterating hours of work in the original painting but it needed doing.
I did get a bit carried away here adding lighter areas in acrylic which I thought a subsequent layer of oil paint would cover more easily than it did. I think that I actually mixed up a greater quantity of acrylic than I needed and was too tight to throw it away so I kept daubing it on!
At this stage I've started to define some of the background area to indicate foliage using oil paint and also you can see where I've roughed in the shapes of the grassy vegetation in the foreground using acrylic.
Here I've worked in oil on the background and discovered that some of the greens, which is not a colour I normally use were not as opaque as I'd hoped so it has taken quite a lot of glazes to cover the lighter acrylic areas underneath so they appear less harsh.
By using oils I have been able to make the fur appear much softer than when I first painted them in acrylic. You can see the effect in the following photographs of the lionesses heads.
This is the completed painting "The Opportunists" ready to go in to it's frame and be submitted to The National Exhibition of Wildlife Art. See http://www.newa-uk.com/ which also has an online catalogue. The exhibition runs from 16th July - 1st August with the preview evening on the 15th July.
