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

Moose

I painted this one pretty quick, three hours, one sitting. It's about 18x24 inches, watercolour on paper.

The difference between the first photo and second is the back of the moose around his hind. I thought it was too ambiguous about how it stood apart from the background, and bigger than intended. So I used an almost dry bristle brush and pushed the background down.

I've taken a bit of grief about painting a realist moose. I chose the subject because I'm going to be showing some paintings at the central library and I'm hoping to sell a couple. All the downtown galleries are stocked with Canadiana. So I picked something there seems to be a market for. Thus the grief.

Anyway, I've been thinking if I did this painting again, I would add something in the foreground to frame the moose and give it more depth. Maybe trees around the edges as a dark frame.

I'm mostly happy with this. I especially like the way the antlers turned out which was truthfully more luck than planned.