Investigating a little further I learned it was a “King” Cheetah. Not at all a different species or subspecies as had been thought for most of the twentieth century. This rare, exotic coat pattern is the product of a recessive gene pairing that must be inherited from both parents. The same phenomenon that results in a black Leopard or Jaguar. Definitive proof of this finally came in 1981 when two separate litters born at the De Wildt Cheetah Center in South Africa produced a king patterned cub. Each of the normally spotted pairings also yielded spotted litter mates along with the King variants.
From the first instant I saw a snap of one of these lads I knew I would someday try painting one. I wanted the "King" to really dominate the scene without doing the "conventional" animal portrait. On a whim I decided to use a lightning strike as my main light source to make doing it a bit more of a challenge. It was that for sure! I also tumbled to the idea of placing him perched in a dead tree. Cheetahs as a rule are uncomfortable climbers and if I could manage to make him look "Regal" up a tree, then I might be onto something.
This one took a fair bit of time due to a couple of health issues, now happily resolved, and a vacation trip that I had all but forgotten about. When I finally got back to it I was so sick of looking at it in my ahhh studio (ahem) that I wanted to throw my paints & brushes at it rather than apply them in the traditional fashion. Now, three weeks later I'm glad I decided not to. It was every bit as difficult as I imagined when I began. The sky being my first major hurdle.
It not only needed to be dark and stormy but dramatically so. I tried doing it in gouache only, my first “Big” sky with the stuff but that proved unmanageable. A damp paper towel made that problem a thing of the past. I turned instead to my trusty old acrylics and whomped out the sky in no time. I wisely saved the sunset from the gouache and am extremely happy that I did, as it lends some extra drama to the image.
Using that lightning strike as my primary light source was a neat idea, but it complicated everything! I was then committed to doing almost every other object back lit in near silhouette. Anything that fell between the lightning and the viewer had to be darkened although there was a subtle transition to more normal reflected light striking various objects as the eye traveled toward the the star of the show. The grass too proved a big pain, not so much because there was a ton of it in the scene but due to how it had to be highlighted.
All because of that damn lightning, great idea, arrrgh! The tree was relatively straight forward but little else was. Every time I sat down to work on it I had to concentrate very hard on which way the light was striking each object, as well as carefully considering where each and every every shadow should fall. I wasn't initially attempting a sepia toned image but the deeper I was into it it became apparent that "other than the black," I was almost there. I held with that notion eventually adding in some reflected color from the sunset onto the cloud deck to complete the effect.
There are a few small things left that I want to fiddle with before it gets a coat of spray varnish, but it is for all intents and purposes finished. Hope you like it.
Gouache and Acrylic on Masonite 16” X 20”
