Wolves

This one I like. It's 18x24 and called "Something Of Interest". I'm beginning to think that in the winter I'm influenced to paint winter scenes (it's almost the beginning of April and we actually got almost 6" of new snow last night). I put a bit more detail into the fur on this one. Am searching for somewhere between Bob Kuhn's lack of fur detail and maybe Terry Isaac who paints more detail than I could have fun with. After all it's about fun isn't it.

Oil Painting

Not something I usually do because most of my work is acrylic but it's always a bit fun to work with different materials. Guess I got the idea after my brother recently visited. These are actually water soluable oil paints but I just used them right out of the tube. I believe oils are richer in color than acrylics and it's certainly an advantage that they stay workable longer but where do you stack a bunch of wet paintings in the cave? It's a smaller painting of Mt Moran in the Tetons. So now I'm back to acrylics and working on a couple of wolves. I'm not a wolf hugger by any means but they are interesting to paint.

Park Ranger

Got the title from Peg...seemed good to me...especially since this was a situation in which the landscape overwhelmed the animal...guess that happens and one has to make adjustments...really like the background, light coming from the right and above...not sure if finished but nice enough to show you. Think this is 18x20 which shows you can get space with small painting.

Whitetail Deer

Nice smaller painting...paying more attention to edges with a snow background. I think 16x20 and it turned out well...pleased with it but still working on many things.

Things are warming up a bit, some of the snow is melting and I can smell spring which is good because I'm tired of running the snow blower. Here's a few knives that have turned out interesting, especially the bottom two. Second from the bottom is a Brusletto blade (Norway) with cariboo ends and some kind of wood in the middle. Extremely light weight and great for camping chores. Bottom one is a Finnish Leuku blade used by the Sami of that country. It's really nice with handcut leather spacers and a stag pommel. Lots of Devcon epoxy (the 2 ton 30 minute kind). One at the top is a nice fighter and one below has a beautiful ironwood handle. See what I mean about knives as works of art?

Moose Painting Finished

This I like although in the early stages I was fairly convinced it wasn't going to turn out well. I should have learned by now that if I stay with a painting long enough it might have possibilities. For this one I used a photograph from an Alaska wildlife reference book and some ideas I got from a Rungius painting for the foreground and background. The sky is inspired by such treatments given by Kuhn in his paintings. These are two of my "teachers" even though both are gone.

New Moose Painting

I guess I just like moose and bears so thought I'd show you the initial stage of this painting. It's an 18x24 and although I start different ways I'm beginning to learn that after a good drawing I like to put in the medium lights and darks to get some idea of the animals anatomy reflected in light. The question of background is always there at this point but I think it has to fit where the animal lives so I'm working on that idea. Will try to keep up on the blog with progressions.