Creating Pride

When an Idea Begins to Look at Itself

Before the polished surfaces, tiny details and layers of imagery, Pride began with something much less impressive.

A pencil sketch.

That's one of the things I enjoy about looking back at these photographs. The finished painting appears deliberate and resolved, but the beginning tells a very different story.

At this stage, I had an idea and a composition beginning to form, but I didn't have every answer.

Nor did I want them.

For me, a painting like Pride develops through the act of painting it. The first sketch gives me somewhere to begin, but once colour reaches the surface, the work starts changing.

Shapes become more important or disappear. Colours alter relationships. New thoughts arrive. Something that seemed essential in the sketch can suddenly become completely unnecessary.

Slowly, the painting moves away from what I thought I was going to make and towards what it eventually needs to become.

There is something rather appropriate about showing you Pride like this.

Because Pride is so concerned with the finished appearance.

Here, I'm showing you everything that came before the appearance was perfected.

Building the Surface

The early stages are broad and deliberately loose.

Before I can lose myself in the minute details that characterise my finished work, I have to establish the colour, balance, movement and structure that will eventually support them.

Then something changes.

The brushes become smaller.

The surface becomes richer.

Broad forms begin breaking into individual elements, and the hours spent on seemingly tiny areas start accumulating.

The painting begins demanding that you move closer.

These photographs capture those stages—not to explain what all the imagery means, but to show you how it came into existence.

The meanings can wait.

Those belong in the Pride journal.

For now, we're going back to the beginning.

Before Pride became concerned with how it looked, it had to learn how to exist.

The First Sketch — Pride Begins

Original pencil sketch for Pride by Julia O'Sullivan, showing the first composition for the Seven Deadly Sins painting.

1. The Sketchbook — Capturing the First Thought

This is Pride before there was a painting.
My sketchbook is where I allow an idea to arrive without worrying too much about whether everything works. I draw, make notes, move things around and capture thoughts before they disappear.
Looking back at the original sketch, I can recognise the bones of the finished work, but I can also see how much I didn't yet know.
That is important to my process.
The sketch isn't an instruction manual. It is the beginning of a conversation.

Pride composition transferred from the original sketch onto the painting surface, ready for the first layers of oil paint.

2. Leaving the Sketchbook — Onto the Painting Surface

The next stage is enlargement and placement.
The little sketchbook drawing now has to occupy a completely different physical space. Proportions become more important. Relationships between shapes change. What seemed perfectly reasonable in a small drawing can suddenly feel completely wrong when enlarged.
At this point I am establishing where everything will live rather than worrying about the final finish.
This is the skeleton of the painting.
There is still enormous freedom to alter it, but for the first time the idea has escaped the sketchbook and become something I have to confront at full scale.
Now I can begin painting.

First colour layer of the Pride painting, with loose initial tones establishing the composition over the transferred drawing.

3. First Colour — Breaking the White

This is always an exciting stage because the pristine surface disappears.
The first colour is loose and almost crude compared with the finished work. I'm not interested in perfection here. I'm beginning to establish temperature, contrast and the broad relationships between different areas.
The drawing remains visible beneath it, but colour has started making decisions of its own.
Some elements immediately become stronger.
Others recede.
The painting has begun separating itself from the drawing.

Second stage of Pride in progress, building the underlying colour palette and defining the main forms of the composition.

4. Finding the Weight

With another layer, I begin looking less at individual objects and more at the balance of the whole composition.
Where is it too heavy?
Where is it too empty?
Where does the eye go first?
The large sweeping forms are particularly important because they have to carry an enormous amount of smaller imagery later. At this point they are still relatively simple, but I am establishing the routes that will eventually lead the eye around the painting.
This stage isn't about decoration.
It's about making sure the painting can carry what I intend to put upon it.

Pride painting in progress as additional layers of colour strengthen the central figure, surrounding structures and background.

5. Establishing the Dominant Forms

Now the major forms begin separating properly from one another.
The central figure becomes clearer, the great fan above begins to command its space, and the sweeping structures around the composition start gaining enough strength to contain everything that will eventually happen within them.
Colour is also becoming less tentative.
I'm beginning to understand which areas need to shout and which need to remain quieter.
I still haven't reached the level of detail that will define the finished painting.
I'm building somewhere for that detail to live.

Developing Pride oil painting with deeper colour and contrast beginning to create greater separation between the main forms.

6. The Palette Begins to Settle

By this stage, I am no longer simply putting colour onto a drawing.
It is beginning to feel like a painting.
The greens deepen. The darker structures become more assertive. The pale figure separates from them. The landscape begins establishing the outer boundaries of the world.
I am constantly stepping backwards at this point.
Close up, I might become fascinated by one area. From several feet away, that same area might completely disrupt the composition.
So there is a constant movement:
paint, step back, look, reconsider, return.
The colour palette is beginning to settle, but nothing is untouchable yet.

Fifth colour-building stage of Pride by Julia O'Sullivan, with the composition gaining depth and stronger tonal relationships.

7. Creating Depth

Another completed layer allows me to start pushing things forwards and backwards.
Some areas need more contrast. Others need softening. Forms that looked separate in the original drawing now have to coexist within the same visual space.
This is where layering oil paint becomes particularly important to me.
I don't want everything to have equal strength.
The eye needs somewhere to rest before being dragged towards something else.
And with a painting this complicated, that balance matters enormously.
Complexity still needs breathing room.

Final colour-foundation stage of the Pride painting, establishing the palette and structure before detailed painting begins.

8. The Foundation Is Complete

This is the final stage of what I think of as building the colour foundation.
The composition now has its overall palette, its major contrasts and its visual hierarchy. The figures and structures exist, the environment exists, and the painting can stand as a whole.
But when I look at it at this stage, I don't see something finished.
I see potential waiting for detail.
The foundation has done its job.
Now comes the part where the painting starts becoming unmistakably mine.

First detailed stage of Pride, with broad painted forms beginning to develop into individual figures, objects and intricate imagery.

9. Detail Begins — From Shape to Story

Now I move closer.
Broad shapes start becoming specific things. Surfaces acquire texture. Faces, objects and smaller forms begin asserting themselves.
This is also where the pace of painting changes dramatically.
A large area that might have taken relatively little time to establish can now consume hours as I begin working into it.
And every new detail has to earn its place.
I don't want detail simply because I enjoy painting detail.
It has to contribute something to the conversation.

Pride painting developing greater detail and intensity as smaller figures, structures and narrative elements emerge.

10. The Painting Becomes Denser

Now the intensity increases.
Areas that once existed as broad circular forms begin breaking into increasingly intricate structures. Crowds become individuals. Surfaces gain marks, edges, divisions and interruptions. Objects that were previously suggested begin acquiring identities.
This is one of my favourite stages because the painting starts revealing itself slowly.
From across the room, there is still one composition.
Move closer and it begins fragmenting into dozens of smaller encounters.
The painting is becoming something that cannot be understood with a single glance.

Advanced stage of the Pride painting, with increasingly intricate details, textures and individual elements connecting across the composition.

11. The Sky Had to Move

By this stage, Pride was very close to completion.
Most of the detail was established, but when I stood back and looked at the painting as a whole, something wasn't working for me.
The sky felt too still.
I like energy to travel through a painting. Even when individual elements are very different, I want them to respond to one another so that the eye is carried around the composition rather than coming to an abrupt stop.
The sky wasn't doing that.
After so many hours of increasingly intricate work, it would have been easy to leave it alone. It wasn't necessarily wrong—but it wasn't contributing enough.
So I changed it.
I introduced more movement, allowing the sky to become part of the rhythm of the painting rather than simply the space behind everything else.
It's a relatively late alteration, but an important one.
Because I don't only look at whether each individual part of a painting works.
I need to feel that the whole painting moves together.

Completed Pride oil painting by Julia O'Sullivan from the Seven Deadly Sins collection, after the final layers of detail and intensity were added.

12. When Everything Finally Belonged

With the movement of the sky resolved, I could return to the painting as a whole.
At this stage, I'm no longer looking for major additions. I'm looking for anything that interrupts the balance, rhythm or flow of the finished composition.
I move around the surface, making final adjustments and judging details both close up and from across the room.
The individual elements may contain their own stories, but visually they cannot exist independently of one another.
Colour has to connect.
Movement has to travel.
The eye has to be allowed to wander.
And eventually I reach that difficult point where another brushstroke would no longer improve what is there.
Pride had stopped being a collection of individual decisions.
It had become one painting.

From First Thought to Finished Painting

This is why I wanted to create these galleries.

The finished painting can make months of decisions disappear.

You see one image.

I remember all the images that existed underneath it.

Every layer remains there, even though much of it can no longer be seen. The loose colour, altered forms, abandoned thoughts and thousands of small decisions have become buried within the finished surface.

The final painting is not simply the last layer.

It is every layer beneath it.

And now that you've watched Pride being built, you can enter the journal to discover the story and symbolism contained within the finished work.

Read Behind Pride →

Jupigio-Artwork-Gallery

Rare - Unusual - Unforgettable

Creating Pride

When an Idea Begins to Look at Itself

Building the Surface

The First Sketch — Pride Begins

From First Thought to Finished Painting

Creating Pride

When an Idea Begins to Look at Itself

Building the Surface

The First Sketch — Pride Begins

From First Thought to Finished Painting

​