Last night, I finally went to see my painting on display in the Surrey Art Gallery. After not painting at all in regular old acrylic paint since high school, this was my first time using it again in 7 years. And this was by far my largest piece in 7 years too – this canvas is 2.5 feet wide and tall.

I started this piece with the intention of submitting it into Arts 2025, an annual juried exhibition, and I’m proud to say I achieved my goal and it got accepted into the show.

This piece was based off of the series of 35mm film photos I took while hiking the Lions mountains with my dad last summer. These were taken on my Canon EOS Rebel SII using Fujifilm 400. I very carefully planned how to pack 3L of water and Gatorade, sunscreen, and snacks into my little daypack while still being able to fit this camera in – and it isn’t the lightest camera either. But it was 100% worth it.

I did everything in this piece from hiking up to take the reference photos to stretching the canvas. Probably the easiest step of this whole process was blocking it out. I always weirdly love how paintings look when it’s just blobs of colour at the start, even though there’s not much skill involved.

And then I started some finer blocking in and adjusted some of the colours. This original colour pallet was a bit of a hypothesis my mom had and originally I wanted to do as minimal mixing as possible – but it didn’t have nearly enough green for what I wanted. My mom used to enter Arts 2025 ever since the late 80s but she had stopped in recent years and encouraged me to enter instead this year, and she had lots of tips on how to create a strong entry too. This won’t be my only entry into a juried show this year – I’ve got my eye on a few more later this summer.

As I was working on this, I was primarily doing watercolour painting, so acrylic was very strange to me. With watercolour, you can let the flow of the water make a lot of decisions for you. With acrylic, you have to take control of every little brush stroke. Figuring out how I wanted the finished piece to look was really overwhelming because I forgot everything about technique. Do I make things look seamless and smooth or do I use very visible, rougher brush strokes?

I actually ended up changing much of the rocks in the bottom corner later on because I realized that the perspective was off. It jarringly cut across the piece at this stage instead of being in harmony with it. But I did figure out much of the technique I wanted for it at this stage. Trying to break out of just green and brown, I used a very light pink and a dusty purple for most of the rocks, and mixed in purple for the shadowy bits of the meadow.

My biggest challenge of all was the trees. I could’ve spent weeks painting each tree precisely but 1. I didn’t have weeks since there was a submission deadline and 2. I wanted to break out of 1:1 realism. So the trees took on a few different iterations.

So I wanted to keep them a bit simpler – a suggestion of form instead of painting each individual branch. Its first iteration was almost cheetah print-like so I decided to add details through adding highlights. And this just became way too busy next to the details of the mountains.

Immediately after adding the highlights I painted over them. Instead I added a few lighter patches where there were whiter dead trees and kept a few highlights where there sun would hit the most as well as having subtle differences between colours in the trees so it wasn’t so flat. I think this helped to keep focus on the mountains while still showing that there were trees there. At this point I had also come down with Covid and had submitted images to be accepted – dropping off the painting to be juried wasn’t for a few days still.

While I’m happy with the finished piece, I still think there were a few things I would have changed if I still had time. And maybe would have workshopped the trees more. But I really love how the rocky mountain tops turned out. Now time to buy more canvas to stretch my next large piece!

This piece is about the journey – my dad and I have a shared passion for hiking and hiking to the West Lion was one of our bucket list items. At this moment – taken from the peak of Unnecessary Mountain which was our final destination when we had set out that morning – we decided to keep pushing through all the way to the West Lion. The rocky path up swirls out ahead of us, leading the way to the top.