My paintings are often inspired by our travels and my just completed painting is no exception. Before the pandemic stopped our traveling, we completed a cruise that circumnavigated Australia. It was a wonderful trip and provided numerous ideas for paintings. We got some great pictures of kangaroos, koalas, and emus, and I was fully expecting to choose one of these iconic Australian animals to paint. However a visit to the Melbourne zoo near the end of our trip changed my plans dramatically.
We arrived at the zoo early on a cool, overcast morning and were among the first visitors. Near the entrance we came upon the wild, big cats exhibits. Knowing how much we love cats, it’s not surprising that we rushed in to see the cats before the crowds arrived. We first entered the snow leopard enclosure and hoped to at least catch a glimpse of one of these famously shy cats. When we looked into the enclosure, we were in absolute shock. A snow leopard was out in full view taking a drink from the artificial stream. We were hoping to maybe see one sleeping half-hidden in a dark corner, but never dreamed of seeing one active, out in the open. Below is the picture I quickly snapped.
It looked like the snow leopard was posing for a painting, and it seemed like fate that we there at that exact moment. I will never get a better opportunity to see a snow leopard up close and personal. Any thoughts of painting a traditional Australian animal immediately disappeared. You see many professional photos of animals, but it’s never the same as using a photo from your own personal encounter with an animal as the basis for a painting. I had found this to be true when I had encounters with both the rhino and the elephant in Africa that led to two of my favorite paintings. The terrible year of 2020 was the Year of the Rat in China, but for me 2020 became the Year of the Snow Leopard and painting it became my primary source of pleasure during that otherwise unpleasant year.
The leopard’s pose while getting a drink from the stream was perfect for the painting, but I wanted to make the setting a bit more colorful and interesting than the zoo’s gray boulders. I looked through a multitude of professional photos of snow leopards in the wild for ideas. This photo caught my attention. It had a very similar feel to the stream in the zoo, but had reddish-brown rocks that complemented the snow leopards’ colors much better.
I also found this photo of a waterfall in the mountains that I thought could provide an interesting background. A waterfall in the distance would help provide depth to the painting, and the multiple layers of rocks in the cliffs would work well with my contextural style.
I started the painting by drawing the pencil sketch of the entire scene, below. I kept the snow leopard’s pose exactly like it was in the zoo. I added multilayered rock cliffs in the foreground and background and a waterfall in the distant background. The waterfall empties into a stream that leads forward to where the snow leopard is getting a drink. It’s an isolated scene of rock cliffs and water except for a few bare trees on the right.
If you are looking for traditional trees, these may need some explanation. I think of snow leopards as being from the mountains of Asia (in China, Nepal, etc), and when I create a painting set in Asia, I like to incorporate Chinese characters when possible. The first use of Chinese characters in this painting are these characters for a tree.
I added some base coats of paint onto the sketch for the rock cliffs, the trees, the waterfall and the stream.
Next came the addition of the most important Chinese characters in the painting. In all of the photos I have ever seen of snow leopards, I’ve always admired the uniqueness of their spots. Their spots are larger and less regular than those on other leopards and consist of dark outer edges of various shapes with somewhat lighter colors inside. I’ve often thought these spots look like Chinese characters so I decided to use some of these characters for this leopard’s spots. The first choice was to use the characters for ‘snow leopard’ which actually look like the spots and are shown below.
I used them as the largest spots running from the neck, down the backbone and then all of the way down the tail. I switched the order and direction of the characters along the way so the spots look more random as they do on the actual animal.
I searched for more Chinese characters that look like snow leopards’ spots while also having meanings that describe them. The next character I chose was for ‘majesty’ which is shown below and is definitely a trait of these majestic cats. I placed this character below the snow leopard characters from the neck, along the back and down the rear leg.
The final characters I chose were for muscular strength. Of course snow leopards are strong, but I particularly like these characters because they look like the smaller spots on the snow leopards’ lower sides and upper legs.
The spots on the snow leopard’s head are smaller spots similar to those on other leopards, so I didn’t use Chinese characters for these. Instead, I painted contextural patterns as I use in all of my paintings. Below you can see all of these Chinese characters painted in black onto the snow leopard.
The inside of each of these characters was filled with a dark tan color to complete each leopard spot.
Then I painted a layer of simple arcs as the initial layer of the snow leopard’s fur. I added additional layers to the fur later as the last steps in the painting.
Now began the time-intensive task of creating all of the intricate contextural patterns onto the rest of the painting. I started by tackling the major job of painting the large expanse of rock cliffs. I first finalized the cliffs’ background colors and added the individual layers of rocks.
For the next 3 months, I painted the contextural patterns and spots onto all of the cliffs. It took all of my self-motivation and concentration to continually paint these intricate patterns using the same basic color each day for 3 months. Since my custom colors are hand-mixed, it’s also challenging to re-create the colors each time I run out. It often takes a full day since it is done by a series of trials and comparisons that each take at least 20 minutes while you wait for the paint to dry to see if the colors match.
But as with all daunting tasks, it was worth the effort once it was finally completed. Here are two close-ups of some of these finished patterns.
Here is a photo of the painting with the completed rock cliffs.
After 3 months of creating patterns and painting them onto the cliffs, the one week spent painting the patterns onto the trees seemed like a vacation.
Refreshingly, it was time for a change in the color scheme. Given the cold, damp area around the waterfall and stream, my choice for the covering of the lower rocks next to the stream was vibrantly green moss. So I began my new ‘green period’ by painting the base colors for the moss.
This green period lasted for 2 months as I created and painted the detailed patterns of the moss. These moss patterns are more plant-like than those on the cliffs and consist of long, frequently branching strands. The 2 months were more varied than the previous 3 months, as I also had the fun of hiding some Chinese characters amidst the strands of moss.
Here is an extreme close-up of a small section clearly showing the strands of moss.
Here is a photo of a large area of the moss.
If you didn’t notice the numerous hidden Chinese characters for moss, go back and look more closely for this symbol.
Small amounts of moss are also added to the top of branches on the otherwise barren trees for one last little splash of green.
With another change of color, I now entered my ‘blue period’ as I went to work on the waterfall and stream. The details for the stream used patterns of dots to show the flowing water and it ‘only’ took a month. Below is a close-up of a portion of the stream.
Here is a photo of the entire stream.
The Chinese characters shown below for ‘flowing stream’ are hidden in the patterns of dots.
These characters can be seen more clearly in this close-up.
The patterns for the waterfall is an adaption from those used for the moss. Larger strands of white water with curls and branches falling from the top are used for the upper falls. Tightly coiled strands are used at the bottom of the falls representing the crashing water. White dots are painted on top of all of these strands to make them feel even more like white water.
For the last few months, I worked on the snow leopard’s fur. I looked at a multitude of snow leopard photos. The color of the leopards’ primary fur on their backs and sides in these photos varied from almost white to a darker brown. I decided to use a relatively light shade of brown for this painting so that the fur would stand out more clearly versus the darker reddish-brown cliffs. In painting the fur, I used multiple layers of varying colors, stroke by stroke, using the tips of toothpicks as brushes. Here are a number of views of the leopard’s fur from the finished painting.
After I finished with the fur, I decided to add a little more color to the mossy areas by adding some small flowers, each consisting of three yellow dots.
To complete the snow leopard, I had to add whiskers. What’s a cat without whiskers? I couldn’t figure out how to paint whiskers since they are so long and thin. Toothpicks are small enough to paint whiskers, but they don’t hold enough paint to paint the whole length with one stroke. I tried painting some practice whiskers using multiple strokes, but they were never as straight and elegant as real ones.
Then I had an ‘aha’ moment. I’ve been collecting our cat’s whiskers as they have fallen out over the years as keepsakes. They just happen to be the right size to fit my snow leopard’s face, so instead of painting whiskers I attached our ‘large’ cat’s real whiskers, and he is now part of my art forever. Check them out!
And here is my finished Snow Leopard painting. I started it in early January 2020 and didn’t finish it until a few months into 2021, so I will always think of 2020 as my Year of the Snow Leopard, and not as our Year of the You Know What.
Let’s hope for good health and happiness for all in 2021!
