Tag Archives: painting

Painting finally completed!!!

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It’s done!!! I wish I could say I painted it all on my own but alas, it’s was all Zoe’s brilliance and hard work which has gotten us to this point!!!! What a relief to finally get the painting done and I must admit, I’m a very happy man.
To start off with, here is a picture of my lounge room which I doubled as my workshop. One corner ceiling was converted to display my completed items. Just a little bit of motivation to keep me going every time I sat down to watch TV….. ……..I would plonk myself on the couch and call out “Zoe, you haven’t finished painting the lion” before proceeding to relax and watch TV while supervising Zoe =D Here is Zoe hard at work putting on the final touches
You can just make out the bottom of my little TV above her head. I took this picture, sitting on the couch. BEST Thanks to the guys on liondancing.org/forum for advising me on the use of varnish. I ended up with a Josonja’s Polyurethane water based gloss varnish and applied 3 coats to give the lion a heck of a glossy look.

And without further adieu, here are some of the photos


This is what the eyes ended up looking like. A combination of the previous two eyes we had earlier. 

And …………………………. here he is!!!
BEHOLD!!! 

And the lovely Zoe with our painted lion head.
Picasso in the making.

Hope you like the look of it so far

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painting progress

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More colours go on and the lion is starting to take on some life.

I should note that the painting was a bit all over the place. Zoe got excited and started going ahead painting the details in before she got the base colours right. There’s a few bits which you can see which look quite messy, where she’s painted over sections roughly in prepartion to fix it up afterwards.

Note along the cheek, zoe had initially painted in the black spikes but painted over it to get the base blue colour right

By this stage, Zoe had decided that she would put the detailing in a bit later and get the colours right so you’ll see certain sections like the black swirls around the nose and the spikes along the top lip with unclean lines. 


We had to improvise for the bit on the side of the eye. We ended up with a simple stripe pattern.
Front shot with cleaner lines.

 

Step 22 and so the painting begins

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I thought I’d use this post to thank my girlfriend Zoe for volunteering to do the painting.
It’s probably better that she does it because she’s much more of a perfectionist so I know that the lion will come out much better than anything I could have produced.
My little contribution was to sketch on the lion all the patterns and to explain to her what needs to be painted what colours and to orientate her to the various screenshots I have taken. My other little contribution was to paint the ears so I can say that at least I painted a part of the lion myself =D

Check it out
This was my contribution with the painting. I suspect Zoe will repaint it. She thinks I did a rushed job and my lines aren’t clean enough. 
And now back to Zoe’s painting
The left and right eyes are different. She was experimenting with shading and blends

Zoe thought it would be cool to have an aqua nose. 
I got her to change it back to green. 

Keep your eyes peeled for more to come

Step 20 the design pattern

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Making and painting this lion head has given me a much much much greater appreciation about the artisans that make lion heads currently, but especially the artists that made them in the past. The amount of details and complex painting that went into the lion heads of old is enough to do my head in!!!
I have literally spent hours and hours watching the lion dance scene of the movie Lion Vs Lion over and over and over again trying to work out the paint job of all the various parts of the lion. In the end I managed to screen shot as many bits as I can but am still short on a couple of parts of the lion which I’ll need to rely on my imagination to complete.
I’ll emphasize it again, it ceases to amaze me how much work and dedication would have gone into making these lion heads. I can understand now why the teams in the past would only bring out one lion head when they went out to perform. Any more that one would be a disservice to each lion head not getting the full attention it deserves.

These are some of the screen shots I managed to capture. Hopefully, you can make out some of the detailing that has gone in. There was a lot of squinting eyes to make out all the fine detail.