Continuing my Leofinance artwork!

Earlier this month I started work on designing artwork based on the logo of Hives sister community Leofinance.

The first steps of my design can be found here where I did several drafts of line art until I was happy enough to continue with paint.

I made several photocopies of the line art which ended up being a great idea because I immediately started painting without putting enough thought into what I wanted the end result to be. The first attempt ended with this orange monstrosity.

First paint attempt

In hindsight I probably could have persevered and ended up with a design even closer to the original logo. I may revisit this colour scheme later.

Next attempt I experimenting different ways on making the mane "fiery". Again I went a little too dark and it resembled magma more than fire, but I saw potential in the mane to the right side. A little less red and some more orange should do the trick.

Rather than starting over I persevered, giving the lion head more realistic colouring and experimenting with a glow around him (which I really didn't like).

Despite there being a lot wrong (I don't know why I thought putting shadow on top of flame would be a good idea), this draft gave me faith that with a little more effort I could make it look good.

The next step was scaling up to the final size of A3.

Can you see the resemblance now?

There's still lots more work to do (like painting over the two dark splodges you see where I dropped a black paint covered brush, a lot of swearing happened).

If you're a fan of #LeoFinance and would like to own this artwork customised with your username please let me know in the comments and I will start looking at international shipping costs.
I'm also considering different colour schemes such as Neon glowing and a Silver coin theme for the silver collectors of Leo so if you have a suggestion for a custom work I'm all ears.