Making a BIG painting from start to finish🧚🏻 full painting process

So I've had this idea for a big painting for a few months now. If any of you saw my video about Art Block, you might have seen me starting a bit of this painting last summer. I started this idea but I didn't really like where it was going, so I just put it aside for many many months. But I just could not get this painting out of my head. And while I was making all these smaller pieces during the past couple of months, this idea just kept calling my name and I knew I just had to try again. My goal with painting has always been to make much larger pieces that present a story that I want to tell or stories that I feel connected with. The smaller studies I make are of course amazing for practice and I love doing them, but they ultimately help me paint the paintings I really dream of. Now this piece was originally meant to be this transitional piece between summer and autumn, but now as spring has slowly started to emerge, I thought this was just as fitting since everything is starting to bloom and grow once again. If you've seen a few of my other videos, it's probably not a huge surprise how much I'm into the Pre-Raphaelites and I have made several sketches of my favorite Pre-Raphaelite paintings as well, but I just keep coming back to them whenever I'm looking for inspiration. I love nature and natural elements in art as well as myths, fairy tales, and folklore stories. And I think I've said all of this before, but I was really inspired by paintings and stories I read on nymphs specifically. And this is just a really quick definition, but nymphs are nature deities in Greek folklore and they are generally regarded as personifications of nature. They are typically tied to a specific place, landform, or tree and are usually depicted as maidens. As I was looking through my sketches of my favorite paintings and paintings of women in these beautiful gowns in nature, I just felt really inspired to make this big painting based on all of these ideas. I had this kind of vision of a girl in a white dress near a tree and kind of looking after the forest and taking care of its surroundings and watching over the blooming and growing flowers and plants. And I thought this was so lovely to paint now in spring as well, since I'm seeing all the trees and plants blossom and grow again. My lovely friend Denise was so kind to be my model and we went to a small forest nearby and did a little photoshoot inspired by this idea. And I made a small mood board of kind of the atmosphere I wanted in the painting, as well as include the paintings that were very inspiring to me. As I said, I already started this idea last year, but I wanted to change the composition slightly. And I also feel now my technique has improved a little bit, so I just wanted to start over completely. And in the end, I feel very good about this decision. I always think it's better to just start over if that is what your gut is telling you, rather than just spending hours trying to fix a painting that you already know is not really working out. So I made a quick outline of where I wanted to position the body and I really tried to paint in some more careful layers, because I'm trying to change my painting technique just a little bit. I want to keep the transparency of the original burnt umber and transparent oxide red under layers peeking through in some areas. And I really like how some of these layers help with giving the painting some more depth and texture, like you can see a lot more of the brushstrokes, which I really like. But yeah, I think I can push this a lot more in future paintings as well. I just love trying to experiment with this and it teaches me a lot about how I want my paintings to look in the future as well. Here, I just wanted to take a little break from painting, so I decided to varnish some of my little studies that I've been collecting over the past couple of months. Some of these are on my website as well, so if you want to check them out, I'll have it linked below. I just love seeing how these paintings come back to life. It's always such a nice surprise to see how the final colors and values look, especially if they have been sitting around for a while. I was quite nervous about painting the background because this is the first time I really painted a larger setting in nature, so I really tried to experiment with all kinds of different greens, but not make it too detailed so the focus would really remain on the foreground and the face and the dress as well. But I really had so much fun with this as I went on, and I loved painting the little specks of light peeking through the dense forest leaves in the background. I just thought that immediately brought some more life into the scene. After working on the background for a little while, I took a break and I got this very very lovely surprise. Someone had actually purchased this little Sargent master study I did a while back. I was so so so happy and I am very very just beyond grateful that someone acquired this little painting, so I just wanted to pack it up as nicely as I could. Every time someone wants a commission or purchases one of my pieces for my website, I am always so so happy and just at a loss for words. It always feels like such a dream come true, and I just want to say thank you so much. You really have no idea what this means to me, and yeah, I'm just beyond grateful for all your support. With a lot of the greens and the leaves surrounding the figure, I scraped back or wiped a lot of the paint away at first and then later added that paint again, just to keep adding more and more depth and texture in the background. And I think this worked quite well. I struggled a lot with the roses and I painted over them many many times, but I like how they turned out in the end, and I will keep practicing them as well in the future to really try and perfect them. But I'm very happy with how this piece turned out. I learned a lot from this and I'm just so happy to have finally made a painting that I've been dreaming of for so long. I'm very glad I pushed myself to try this concept again, even though the first time didn't really go the way I wanted to. I'm very excited to paint more of these kind of paintings and tell stories I really feel connected to and convey the atmosphere that I want. And I also think that is the beauty of painting, it is just a never-ending journey to try to attain your own personal way of conveying the things, emotions and stories you want. And I'm very happy that this painting is another step in the right direction for me. Thank you so so much for watching this process, I hope you enjoyed and I hope you feel inspired to paint or create whatever you want, and whatever you feel calls to you and connects with you, no matter how challenging it might be, you just have to keep trying and trying again. Thank you so so much for being here once again, and I hope to see you next time.