Enter Safari, nursery style

For all my painting supplies, I don't really paint a lot anymore. Ever since I finished at ACAD, all my finished work has been digital, and all traditional work has been in pencil, marker, and sometimes pen, so this was a wonderful return to the past! 

My friend, Jaylene, and I were approached by our mutual friends to paint their nursery; we said yes, rose glasses on, and thus began the journey into the proverbial wild. 

I'm embellishing for fun, this actually went very well! I had some reservations going into this, mostly based off of how I have reacted in group art situations in the past (I'm a stubborn, prickly human in those scenarios), but Jaylene and I were able to work through it. We had some arguments that got rather loud, but nothing that ever got heated. There may have been some paint fights though. 

The initial idea took some time, and Jaylene handled the first sketchings, which I then used to draw my rendition of the scene. We used my scene base for the initial drawing, and then combined our designs for the animals. It was pretty true to form, minus one male lion, whom we both ended up hating and cutting from the final painting. The piece works better without him! 

We used regular house paint for almost the entire painting (monkey was the exception), and it was the first time I'd used house paint as a fine art medium. As it was a latex base, it wasn't that different from normal acrylic craft paint, which was great; it behaved fairly similar to craft paint, although it wasn't as delicate in action. It certainly was pretty great for large areas, and most of it covered really well, but it wasn't that great for small areas or detail. Opacity issues became apparent when I started painting the details on the lion cub, and then again on the giraffe. Craft paint has, in my experience, been very good with its opacity, and had I had the budget for it, I honestly would have preferred this painted entirely with craft acrylic. However... it wasn't the end of the world, and we were able to make it work successfully. The lack of opacity did end up helping with the blending, and blending nicely. 

We tried to keep everything fairly flat, once we started into fine tuning and detailing, but that always wasn't successful (cough cough tree trunk, lion, cough cough); all the animals got a nice black outline, while the foliage and scenery remained blank. Finishing up ended up being very quick, and the end result was a mural everyone was happy with. 

I'm so happy we did this: the nursery looks awesome, friends are happy, and I remember how awesome painting is. I can't wait to do another :)