Over the past year I’ve fallen in love with painting, especially acrylic painting on canvas. I started out doing some tutorials, but soon enough I wanted to do my own thing and work out some of my own ideas. This is my latest painting and I’m really happy with how it turned out! I thought it would be fun to walk you through the various stages of painting it.
After getting down the background, I immediately started on the deer. The idea was for it to peek out from behind some bushes, so (what I thought would be) the biggest challenge was coming right up! I started with a faint outline, as you can still see a bit around the ears, and when I was happy with its general shape, started filling in colour and details. It looked so crappy for such a long time! It took layer after layer of paint to even remotely resemble a deer face. You can imagine when I reached this stage, I was pretty pleased.
During the next painting session, I kept working on the deer, bringing more texture to her fur and adding lots more shadows and highlights. She suddenly looks older! I learned a lot from painting the deer. Just before it was time to make dinner, I took some green paint and started roughly outlining the greenery. It was nice to just wave around my paintbrush after such detailed work on the deer.
When I returned to the painting, I was really unhappy with what I’d done with the background while casually waving around the paintbrush the other day. So I started this painting session with completely painting over the background and most of the greenery, while trying not to mess up the deer in the progress. Then again, I ended the session with roughly outlining the greenery, but I liked it much more this time around.
Next up was adding detail to the leaves. It took two sessions to reach the point where I was happy with the colours, shadows and highlights, but I loved working on it. I learned so much during this stage as well. I had left the deer alone during the last few sessions, but wasn’t happy with her snout. I worked to make it less stiff, adding a sort of overbite, a more defined chin together and a mouth that was more than just a line. It was the finishing touch!
Here she is in all her glory! You can see I changed the areas in between and around the leaves as well and let me tell you, that was the part I struggled with the most. I changed the background 3 times before I felt like I got it right. For some reason it was harder in that regard then both the deer and the greenery, which I think is funny. I think I was trying to achieve a result that didn’t come naturally to me.
I’m really happy with how this painting turned out and excited to be hanging it above our baby boy’s crib, who is due to join us in less than 10 weeks!
Thank you for visiting this space and looking at my work. Let me know if you have any questions!
xx Inge
