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| Cougar: |
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| Cougar: |
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| Jan has been invited to participate in a prestigious museum exhibit entitled COWGIRL UP! It features western art by prominent western artists. Jan is the first "wildlife" artist who has been invited. She wanted to do something really eyecatching, and after looking through her reference she decide to do a cougar perched in an old dead snag overlooking a beautiful red rock valley. Here are the two main photos she will be working from. |
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| Jan does a drawing to size on tracing paper which she attaches to the top of the painting with hinges of masking tape. This way she can flip the drawing back and forth to transfer elements onto the painting surface with artist transfer paper as she needs them. |
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| Jan is now starting on the far off hill. She is creating the trees with an old brush that she "pushes" upward. |
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| Jan has not painted the southwest very often. She wanted to do a little research on the colors to use in painting the red rocks. An artist named Kenny McKenna, who specializes in this area, is in the same gallery with her (Settlers West) and also does Natureworks. He just had an article in the recent ART OF THE WEST. She pulled some of the pages out of the magazine to study how he did rocks. Jan is a big believer in studying, not only nature, but other artists' work as well. |
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| Part of the background is now done. You can see where Jan has flipped the drawing back over and transferred part of the main elements so that she can see where the cat and tree will be in the composition. |
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| More of the background has been started, loosely "scrumbling" it in to create texture and delineate where the rocks and vegetation will be. |
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| Jan is still working from back to front on the foreground, detailing as she goes. |
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| Jan creates atmospheric perspective by applying thin layers of wash with a brush and then while it's wet, she smoothes it out with a foam rubber sponge. The wash is white with a touch of blue. Many mistakes beginning artists make is to let their mind tell them what color something is rather than their eyes. The far off embankments and rocks are "behind" layers of air that have moisture, dust etc. This causes receding landscapes to be lighter and bluer than close up ones. |
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This photo is a more accurate color than the former postings. It is difficult to get the colors correct photographing inside on the painting table even with adjustments for the white balance. So this step I took outside to photograph to get more accurate color The butte has been completed. A liquid "masque" has been applied to the cougars feet and tail and one branch of the tree to protect these areas and keep them "clean" while I work on the tree. |
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| The tree has been blocked in with a mixture of burnt umber (brown) and purple paint. |
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| The tree has been completed ,and now work has started on the cat. Jan does a very lengthy process of creating fur that she likens to building a house. It creates a "depth" to the fur so that you literally feel you can put your fingers into it. Here she has begun the detailing process, painstakingly "drawing" the hair coat out with sepia colored paint - paying close attention to the direction the hair lies and the length of it (ie: short on face and legs, longer on body). |
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| After the hair has been "drawn" in Jan then does a unifying wash. In this case it was a combination of burnt umber and burnt sienna. Before the paint dries she rubs it to get rid of any brush strokes. |
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| Here is the completed painting - "RED ROCK REALM", 20 x 24". It premiered at the COWGIRL UP! museum exhibit on March 26-28, 2010. www.westernmuseum.org |
