“The Painting of Nia #1”
Suddenly, from a deep sleep, my eyes flew open. I was looking at the dark ceiling of my bedroom. As my consciousness began to focus, a strong voice in my brain said:
“Paint only the stripes with no shadows or shading. Leave as much white paper as possible. Use only blue for the eyes, red for the nose and burnt sienna under the chin.”
Now wide awake, I rolled over and looked at the clock, eight minutes after four in the morning.
Now I could remember that the day before I had been attempting to do a watercolor painting of Nia, a white tigress that lives at PrideRock Wildlife Refuge. My plan was to do a dark background to contrast the whiteness of the tiger. I planned to do the dark background of the painting by using a wet painting technique. This is a technique in watercolor painting where the colors are put on a very wet surface and moved around and blotted out until the painting is mostly done. I had recently done that successfully doing the sky for the last landscape painting of Palo Duro Canyon and I was feeling somewhat confident that I could do it again for this painting.
To do this wet technique, the artist has to have a good plan and all the colors and towels ready before starting, because once started, things happened fast. I had it all ready and picked up my big round, #36 brush, wet the paper and started applying Ultramarine Blue and Burnt Umber. At first it was looking pretty good and had great potential, however it was hard to get it dark enough, so I kept adding more color. Things began to get out of control and then it quickly got worse.
Then I changed my game plan—I decided to just make the background kind of an abstract type design. That wasn’t working either, so late the night before, I had looked at the unfinished painting with its muddy colors and wondered if I was looking at a masterpiece or just a disaster.
It didn’t take long to come to the conclusion that it was a disaster and it was time to give up and go to bed.
As an architect, I had spent a lifetime of trying to solve problems. I learned early in my career that if I had a problem that I couldn’t solve, I could often get a solution by breaking the problem down into its parts before I went to sleep at night. Then upon waking the next morning, often I would know the solution to the problem. I think that is what happened here with the painting of Nia.
I rolled out of bed, got dressed, made coffee and got started.
I decided to use the technique that I had developed to do pen and ink drawings of animals. I first started with the eye. Moving out from the eye, all of the brush strokes to do the stripes were done in the direction of the hair pattern. No black was used. The stripes are made with French Ultramarine Blue and Burnt Umber. Sometimes I let the cool blue show and in other places I let the Burnt Umber dominate. I left the pencil outline.
As I finished the ear and was moving down onto the neck, Nia began to look real. I could see that this painting was going to be what I was looking for. I finished the painting in one day.
I like the looks of this painting. I am prejudiced, though, since I am the one who painted it. I need other opinions—please email me your comments. Hopefully you will like it, but if you don’t like it, tell me and I will try to be a big boy and not get too offended.
Cheers,
Acree
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