Welcome to Pryo Shows Lights Up Neyland – 3rd Saturday in October 2022
Let’s start with acknowledgements. I want to thank the man who commissioned this work, and the team of people who got legal permission from University of Tennessee to use the reference and is allowing us to make limited edition prints. Go Vols!!! This is October 15th, 2022 when the Vols beat Alabama in the last 2 seconds of the game. Chase McGrath kicked a field goal in those last 2 seconds to beat Alabama 52-49. It should be mentioned that Alabama had a chance to make a field goal minutes earlier and failed! Tennessee orange took over the field!
The drawing. Drawing the details was very time consuming. This was drawn accurately from the reference with grid lines and matching grid lines on the reference. Some of the areas required a search on the internet for other references where the details were murky. Unfortunately, a lot more details than I would have preferred. And the colors on the reference were red and pink. Uh no! Neyland Checker is Orange and White!
The Sky and the placement of the Pyro Shows fireworks. The sky was fun. Free brush strokes with a mix of Payne’s gray, cerrulean, cobalt blue and white. I had to wait for a skin on the sky to start the fireworks since orange and wet blue make an army green.
The Fireworks. A few layers of colors and Pyro Shows Lights up the sky. I had to pull up multiple other day time refrences to determine the buildings in the background.
The Architecture. Sky boxes may look simple but without a steady hand, no deal. They are drawn accurately with a scale, but all the painting is done free hand. If you use a brush with a ruler, the paint goes under the ruler and generally makes a mess of your lines. For some unknown reason I started on the right. For 17 years I’ve always worked left to right … I don’t know why I started on the right.
The seats. I remembered about 14 years ago, I painted a Chicago Skyline – I put the base coat down of the building and let it skin over for a day. When I painted all the windows, the paint went on easy without losing it’s definition. When I first started the seating here, I forgot that. So each seat ended up with 5 or 6 layers of paint to keep the orange and white checker. Wet on wet was not the answer. It took 5 hours to do a 3×3 square. Once I remembered what I had done in the Chicago painting, that went much quicker. However, 60,000 people still takes quite a long time!
A lot of these seats shown were the wrong process. Then there was the marquee! The original reference had advertisement … Didn’t work for me. This was the first attempt using multiple other references from that game. Later TN score was changed from white on orange to orange on white. That way Alabama didn’t over shine Tennessee! We couldn’t have that!
Changing the seating process. Base coat of payne’s gray for the white shirts and terra/payne’s gray for the orange shirts. Of course most of you know that you have to go on line to see what shirt color you need to wear, depending on your seat number. By the time this reference was taken, everyone was moving to the field or into other spaces. More than half way done with the seats and the marquee is better balanced. I got really really lucky here. The seats took a long time. That allows the paint on your pallette to dry and requires remixing of the colors and matching the mix. Our orange was 2 oranges straight from the tube – toxic cadmium oranges but still straight from the tube. When it dried, scrape and put some new paint down, no mixing!!! That saved sooooo much time.
The Field and Sidelines. I had to stop the seating because I have a bad habit of putting my hand down on the canvas while painting. To solve that issue, I work left to right. So field first, seats on the right last. The sidelines required a lot of other references to figure out what things were on the sidelines. Also the banner was filled with advertisement. So the Client and I decided on 5 of some of the most important and impactful players from the history of Vols football. Their names are on the banner instead. Can you guess who they are?
What remains are the last seats and then the sides of the canvas since this is a gallery wrap canvas. I thanked God a lot for all those Physics classes that taught me perspective. This one was one heck of a challenge in that area. The final challenge was for the printer. He had to match the blues in the sky (Payne’s gray, cobalt and cerulean). Not an easy thing to do. And the photo does not always relate to what prints out on canvas or paper. And the orange is the next thing that is extremely hard to do. Jim Wells is one amazing printer with his very own gift! Thanks for traveling with me through the many hours of this painting. See you next time.
