Joe stumbled across an old University of South Florida bull head statue that he wanted me to paint. He finished his undergrad at the college and I just completed my Master’s last week. I thought it would be a fun break from canvas/wood panel painting and binge painted it in mostly metallic acrylics.
I had an idea of what I wanted to do but pretty much winged the process (or you can say intuitively painted the design!). I started with the horns in gold and painted the crevices bronze. I harkened back to when my cousin and son painted tiny metal figurines. They spray painted black into the deeper recesses and then painted the metal colors over top and wiped them off. Or, some people use wax and mica powder and brush over the metal. I decided to paint the black on after the first coat of bronze acrylic. I enhanced the darkness with payne’s gray. Then I used cold wax and bronze metallic mica powder and brushed it on with my fingers. A soft hake brush was used to dust it off and spread it around.
For the “mask,” I drew in the U.S.F. academic logo on the forehead and the athletic logo under that in graphite. It did smudge and didn’t erase easily, but it was easy to cover up with acrylic paint. The iridescent bright gold Liquitex heavy body acrylic paint was semi-transparent. I wound up mixing it with white to cover any darker paint that obscured where it needed to go. Then, I finished it up with some yellow Posca markers and a final layer of the gold paint again.
The Posca markers were so much easier than the junky brushes I had. The best brushes I have are reserved for watercolor! I wound up painting the background, mask-area dark green. Then, I used an oil pastel for the brocade scribble design. Since the green wasn’t exactly the correct color, I used a brighter green Posca marker to fill in the green of the logos and to go over the “type” font.
