Expressionist Moose

I started this painting at Swinton's in a class taught by Michelle Grant. She helped me getting the alignment of the moose right.

 I worked on it some more at home the next couple nights. Adding the darks.

The one above is a filtered photo of the painting. I was trying different photo effects on my camera, seeing if any would steer me in a particular direction, since I wasn't set on if it should be high key or low and what the colours would be. 

The photo below is also an effect that influenced my direction. I decided to desaturate the colour of the background by adding grey and hoping the figure would pop more with colour.

Below is the final result. It's still quite colourful. But I'm pleased with it. Moving on at any rate. Tired of fiddling with it.

Another moose

Another moose painting. I did this one quite quickly. Maybe two hours, tops. Mostly trying sort of a drip look. But I took some pains with the shape as well. Not so much with the colour. I quite like it. 

I thought the rack on the last moose painting might be somewhat of a fluke. I really liked that part of the painting. But these ones turned out quite nice too. So perhaps it wasn't so much a fluke.

The reason I didn't take so much time was that I intend to start tracking my 10,000 hours painting. These being the first two. So I didn't want to get too detail orientated. Not sure if the logic is quite right there. Probably more because I'm not a detail orientated kind of guy. In painting at any rate, I like to use a big brush. If I spend 10,000 hours, I'm sure I'll come across the colours and style that's mine without fussing too much about it in the first two hours. However pro athletes are always saying they practice hard. So that's a totally opposite philosophy.

18x24" watercolour

West Coast Trail

This is a work in progress

It's huge and taking forever. 40x59 inches. I see why big paintings cost so much more. The material alone cost so much. It's sucking up a lot of paint. Will probably be about 5 big 20 ml tubes. And the paper itself was in the $160 range. So that's about $250 total. And i'm not convinced it'll even turn out. I can't even imagine what it would cost to frame. But it will be unique.

I've never seen a watercolor so big. Keeping my fingers crossed it will turn out and not just be crumpled up and used as fire starter.