The Running Paintbrush: Beast's Enchanted Rose

Tale as old as time,

Song as old as rhyme.

Beauty and the Beast

Inspiration for my latest painting. The enchanted rose in Disney's Beauty & the Beast holds the key to the Beast turning back into a prince. It's been ages since I've watched this movie, but for some reason one of the scenes from it popped into my head a few weeks ago. While the narrator explains the Beast's backstory, there is a screen shot of the rose in a stained glass window. I couldn't get that image out of my head and knew it would be a really cool painting if I could pull it off.

The shot from the movie

I knew I had to be very exact with my lines and shapes, so I grabbed some plates from the kitchen and started making circles.

Finally, our wedding china gets used!

After that, it only took me about 15-20 minutes to sketch in the lines for the glass window pieces and the rose.

Now you can see how much erasing I end up doing

I thought this painting would be a cinch, basically just coloring in the blocks, but it wasn't quite so simple. With so many different shades of blues and pinks, a lot of color mixing goes into it. And with that, comes the dreaded guessing game of how much paint to mix. I always end up mixing too much paint then is required for an area. But that's far better than running out and then having to match that exact shade again (its nearly impossible).

I ended up doing 2-4 layers of paint per block to get a really nice opaque color, no brush strokes visible! It required a ton of patience, for which we all know I have none.

Once I finally had it all colored in, I was really dreading the outlining of each piece in black, but that turned out to be the easiest part! I'm so happy with this, and am even considering pouring some heavy duty gloss over it to give it an extremely shiny finish.