Paintings and process

New Painting Debut! “Hustai Takhi Stallion”

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I’m currently working on a large painting that is the most complex one I’ve done yet. I’ll post it when it’s finished. But, in the meantime, I’ve kind of taken a break from it on and off to do something simpler and more straightforward, a head study of a takhi stallion I saw at Hustai National Park in 2006. I had a reference shot that I liked because of the shadow pattern, but as you’ll see there were adjustments that had to be made for it to work as a painting. I hope this step-by-step illustrates how important it is to not, as they told us in art school, get “married to your reference”.

My subject is on the right. A stallion keeping an eye on his mares on a sunny fall day.
The reference photo. It's a little out of focus, but, hey, I'm an artist. 🙂
When it's a simple subject like a head study, I dive right in with a brush drawing. Notice that I'm looking for basic shapes, not detail.
First pass with color, laying in shadow areas.
All-over basic color lay-in. Composition, drawing, value pattern set.
About mid-way through. The stage is set for the fun part. Head is almost done and it's time to do the neck, ear and mane. I worked those folds for most of yesterday afternoon. They had to read correctly, but not stand out too much. Notice that by this point I've ditched the hard cast shadow because it was too visually distracting. I want viewers to look at his head, not his neck. I worked the boundary of the shadow until I got what I wanted, keeping the edge soft.
The horse is done. Now I've started to put in a second color on the background. Not sure where I was going to go with it, but ended up liking it enough that I made it the final color. I liked the complementary color relationship between the reddish horse and the greenish background.
Hustai Takhi Stallion 22x28" oil on canvasboard

Five Reasons To Do Small Paintings

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Over time, I think most painters end up with preferences for size, ranging from true miniatures that may only be an inch by an inch to, well, big, really big. Like ten feet high.

I’ve tended to stay in a middle range, which happens to be what has NOT been selling during the recession. But before the meltdown, I had decided to start doing art festivals and I needed a large body of work. Most of the paintings are 12×16″ to 18×24″.

Then I joined the Lost Coast Daily Painters and found myself needing to have a small (5×7″ to 8×10″) painting to post every week. It was hard at first to work that small, but I got used to it and started to see some definite advantages:

One, they are more affordable for people.

Two, many buyers and collectors don’t have room anymore for work that is much bigger and it encourages them to take a chance on a new artist. That would be me.

Three, small works seem to be considered appropriate for gift-giving, so that expands the market a little.

Four, for me as an artist, I’ve found that it’s a good way to study various painting problems, like capturing light effects, without investing time and materials in a larger piece that might not pan out.

Five, they force me to focus on one idea and to keep it simple.

Here are three recent small works:

Arcata Bottoms Stormlight oil on canvasboard 8x8"

I wanted to capture the light effect of dark clouds and sunny areas. Working in a square format was fun, too.

Black Bear, Grand Tetons oil on canvasboard 16x8"

I’ve struggled with how to paint this kind of light effect- foreground shade and background sun. It’s a push and pull process. I think this works pretty well.

Reticulated Giraffe, Samburu oil on canvasboard 8x10"

Once again, I’m studying how to do a light effect- the high key shadows and reflected light on the head of the giraffe. I also ended up with a postive/negative shape relationship that I like. The color of the giraffe and the sky form a complementary color relationship, too.

What has evolved over the past year is an interesting split that is working well for me. I’m doing a lot of smaller pieces like the ones above (I plan to have 30 or so available at the Marin Art Festival). And then I’m painting larger, major pieces that can require a lot of preliminary work. With luck, you’ll see the latest one next week.


In Case You Get Discouraged As An Artist Sometimes….

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I think we’ve all had the experience of looking at art that is really, really good. It’s both an inspiration and sometimes a cause of despair. But one of the traditional ways to train one’s eye is to look at good art. Lots of it. In the original.

Then there are the days in the studio when we wonder why we ever thought we could do this. We know (I hope) what our goal is for a particular painting, but we Just Can’t Quite Get There.

It can be easy to lose perspective. Sometimes it’s helpful to remember that the artists we so admire didn’t begin at the high level we associate with their work.

I happen to have accumulated over the years some examples in print of early work by some very well-known artists, along with their mature work. I thought I’d offer three examples today.

I want to make it clear that I don’t believe that any of the early examples are “bad” or inferior in any way. The purpose of showing them is simply to demonstrate that everyone’s art evolves over time (or should). They are illustrations, not easel paintings, so they were done as jobs for an art director, with whom the artist didn’t always see eye to eye. The limitations of commercial work are what led them to become what we think of as Fine Artists, who paint or painted only for themselves.

Keeping that in mind:

Howard Terpning is one of the most prominent American painters working today. I knew his name as an illustrator and it wasn’t until I became a painter that I encountered him as a fine artist. His work didn’t attract me much since I’m not that interested in Native Americans, his specialty. But I was at a workshop with John Banovich, who is known for his African wildlife paintings, particularly lions and elephants, and there in his studio, kept near his easel, was a book of Terpning’s work. John picked up the book and explained that it was worth studying for the quality of the painting, separate from the subject matter. I took my turn paging through it and saw immediately what John meant, so I bought my own copy as soon as I got home. I learned a valuable lesson that day: don’t let subject matter get in the way of learning from a great artist.

Nice narrative from the rabbit's point of view. 1966
Detail from "Hope Springs Eternal-Ghost Dance" 1987

Guy Coholeach, as far as I know, has always been an animal artist, although when he was an illustrator I suspect he took the jobs as they came, regardless of subject matter. I do remember knowing and admiring his work from long before I went back to art school and got a degree in illustration. When I became an animal artist myself, there he was, one of the most prominent wildlife painters in the field. He’s probably best known for his paintings of the Big Cats. One of the things I find inspiring about his work is that he doesn’t arbitrarily limit himself to one “style”, but does what’s needed to express his vision of a subject. So his work can range from very tight and beautifully rendered to juicy and painterly. In either case, his drawing, composition and paint handling is impeccable.

From "The Look-It-Up Book of Mammals, 1967
Detail of "Hanging Out", 1989

Bob Kuhn is my idol. Simple as that. Especially when I was struggling on all fronts trying to do a decent painting, I’d get stuck on some aspect and ask myself “What would Bob do?”. I’d get down my Bob Kuhn books (I have all of them) and go through them until I found his solution. I’d bounce off it to come up with what worked for me, knowing that ultimately I had to find my own way and not rely on someone else. Not to knock other artists at all, but I personally don’t have, and have never had, any interest as a painter in detail per se. In an art genre where highly detailed work has been the standard, Bob Kuhn was a beacon of light and hope that I could find a place in the animal art world while working in a painterly manner. I also learned from him not to compromise on getting the best reference possible, to draw from live animals as often as possible and to be knowledgeable and accurate in how I portray a species in their anatomy, behavior and habitat. Can’t ask for more than that from your hero.

He always did action like no one else. 1952
Detail of "Lions Waiting for Night to Fall", 1978

Mongolia Monday- New Painting Debut!

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Last week was pretty intense. I had a painting to finish for submission to an invitational show (which it may or may not be accepted into; we’ll see). It’s by far the most complex and difficult one I’ve taken on so far. The kind where, once you’re well into it and can see what level of effort it’s going to take to pull it off, you wonder if you’re out of your mind. But I felt really driven to paint it, so off I went. I think it took somewhere between 60 and 80 hours, spread over about three weeks, but I wasn’t really counting. I didn’t have time.

I normally post about my painting activities on Fridays, but when you see the reference image that inspired me, I think you’ll agree that it’s right for Mongolia Monday.

I photograph the process when I do “major” paintings, both to have a record and to be able to refer back to previous points while it’s in progress. I thought you might enjoy following how this one developed.

So, to start, here’s the image that said “PAINT ME!” It was taken at a local Nadaam in the town of Erdene, which is about an hour east of Ulaanbaatar, in July of 2009. It was pouring rain when we arrived, just in time to see the finish of the horse race. Fortunately, it stopped and, although it was cloudy and muddy, we had a great time and I got at least three or four more painting ideas from the afternoon.

I loved everything about this image: The two horses neck and neck. The fact that one boy is using a traditional Mongol wood saddle and the other is riding bareback in stocking feet and how different it makes their body positions as they ride flat out for the finish line. The way the orange and yellow is repeated in their clothes and the saddle.

The only thing missing was great light. Hum, what to do? I decided that rather than trying to change the light, since July is the rainy season (or at least it’s supposed to be) in Mongolia, which means that at least some of these races happen in wet conditions, I’d just go with it and make the fact that it was a rainy day part of the story.

The  background didn’t do anything for me and since most of the people who will view the final painting won’t be familiar with the setting or situation, I needed to add some context. The first step was to do a pencil drawing that included all the elements to make sure everything would go together even though I used at least six different photos for the final composition.

The drawing is done on 19×24″ tracing paper. The finished painting is 28×36″. The grid lines are a traditional (dated back to the Renaissance) method of transferring a drawing to the larger surface. Notice how many spectators there are and where the buildings are. I had already decided to leave out a line of cars that were behind the people.

I have also decided to paint these scenes as I see them. I’m not going to “romanticize” them by substituting traditional hats for the baseball caps or putting the kids in del. While I’m very interested in Mongolian history and might do paintings with historical themes, with historic costumes and armor, if I can get the reference, for the most part I’m interested in Mongolia as it really is right now, in the 21st century.

Once the drawing is transferred to the canvas with a pencil, I re-draw it with a brush, always correcting and refining as I go.

In this case, I decided to start by laying in the background first. I wanted to establish the lightest lights and also the atmospheric perspective of the mountains in the distance. You will also notice that I’ve ditched all the people on the right and cut down the number of people on the left. The buildings are gone, too. I really felt that I needed to simplify things. One of the lessons I’m learning is how what works at one size may not work at a much larger size. It’s what stalled me on the big argali painting.

Next, I laid in the first layer of color on the figures, going dark so I could come back in with lighter colors. Everything is in what is called “local color”-the “real” color of an object not affected by a light source. Notice the drawing is pretty much gone, but that’s ok because, I know I can get it back as I go.

Now, I’m past the opening stages. The set-up is done and the constant process of painting, correcting and refining has begun. I’ve laid in the folds on the boy’s clothes and gotten the basic modeling done of the muscles and structure of the horses. Where before, the background had seemed too crowded, now it seems too empty and the people are just standing there, isolated, with no context.

Here you can see how I work. The computer is a 24″ iMac with a glossy monitor, so it’s like painting from very large transparencies. I can easily toggle back and forth between the various images that I’m using. You can see that I’ve added the buildings back in, but now they are behind the spectators, which creates one visual unit instead of two scattered ones. And now there are gers in the background. I’m thinking at this point about the white of the boy’s hats being repeated in the hats of two of the spectators, then repeated again with the gers. So it’s kind of like a bar of music with the white elements as the “notes”.

Here’s a detail of the people and buildings in progress. The good people of Erdene would probably be really confused if they saw this because I’ve used my “artistic license” to move and rearrange the structures to suit me. But I’d like to think that they’d recognize their friends and neighbors. Unfortunately, the pattern on the one woman’s blue del ended up being too visually distracting, so I had to make it just a plain blue. All the colors are intended to relate to each other in a somewhat limited palette and not compete with the jockeys. Oh, and that’s the Mongolian flag at the top of the blue building. Couldn’t leave that out. Notice also that I’ve added the road that runs through the town.  It’s on a diagonal, which is more dynamic than a horizontal. I want it to support and emphasize the main action. That’s also why the lines of dirt at the horses feet are on the diagonal, as you can see in the image above.

Here’s a detail of the jockey’s faces in progress, along with the horse’s heads. They all went through three or four repaints before I got them the way I wanted them. Notice that I haven’t painted any of the tack yet, other than the orange saddle. That’s the final level of detail that I leave for the final orchestration. Also, the paint has to be dry so that if I make a mistake on a stroke I can pull it off without wrecking what I’ve done underneath.

At one point, I stopped, got a piece of paper and a charcoal pencil and did a couple of studies of the boys and the bridle of the horse on the right to make sure that I understood the shapes correctly and could paint only the ones I needed.

I highly recommend this. Instead of flailing around in paint, hoping to somehow get it right, do a quick drawing to work out the problem. It saves a lot of time, paint and frustration.

One thing I noticed almost at the end was that, as a design decision, I had the right-hand horse’s tail flowing off the canvas. When I was looking at another image for another reason, it hit me and I remembered that the race horse’s tails are bound part-way down. What an awful mistake that would have been. Quick scrap down and repaint.

And here is the finished painting: Rainy Day Finish; Erdene Nadaam, 2009

Five Things Artists Can Do While Waiting For Spring

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We had a heck of a series of winter storms last week here in California. And this week a large chunk of the rest of the country is getting wacked. It’s stay indoors season. Not a great time to paint outdoors, unless you’re one of those seriously hardcore plein air folk, or do fieldwork if you are an animal artist. Snow is one thing, but driving rain and hail, high winds or ice storms are something else. What to do (drums fingers on table)? Here’s some ideas:

1. Ask yourself- What are you really bad at?- Trees? Water? Fur? Eyes? Be honest. We all have our strengths and weaknesses. I remember my artist sister-in-law telling me about a classmate at art school whose use of color was, apparently, pretty awful. He made a commitment to improve and is now a nationally known artist and illustrator known for, among other things, his incredible use of color. What I learned from this story is that, with hard work and a willingness to struggle and learn, a weakness can be turned into a major strength.

There's probably at least six exercises that one could do from this photo. What are they?
Cinereous vulture, Bronx Zoo; opportunity to show depth and form in an eye study; the photo flattens the image; what do you have to do to compensate?

Exercise: Set aside some time each week to work on something that’s hard or that you feel is a weak point in your work. Do little studies that should only take a hour or two. Don’t bit off a big chunk like “water”. Break it down into smaller problems like reflections or what pebbles look like through water. Robert Bateman says that he used to sit and watch water for hours to learn what the pattern was. You could throw stones in a big mud puddle to study ripples.

2. Take a look at your old work- Creating art can be very discouraging. Sometimes it seems like we’re just spinning our wheels. Progress in gaining any skill is usually incremental. Someone who hadn’t seen my work for awhile was visiting my studio recently and commented that my work had taken a great leap since they’d last seen it. I found that very gratifying, but also interesting. I do occasionally paint something in which it all comes together and there is a big move forward, but that’s the exception.

old reference 4x6" photo (cropped) from 1996
Painting (cringe) from 1997; it looked ok to me at the time; I could write an entire post now about what's wrong with it
Brush drawing from a couple of weeks ago for an 8x8" painting; the difference should be obvious

Exercise: Get some of your favorite beverage, pull out your old work and set it up next to your latest pieces. What do you think? I hope you see steady improvement over time, which should give you some well-deserved encouragement. If you don’t, then see if you can figure out why. Be honest. I know some artists who seem to think that amount of years spent painting equals good work. Not true at all. Twenty-five years of doing the same subjects in the same way with the same technical problems still means mediocre paintings.

3. Evaluate your photo reference- a famous wildlife artist who I was lucky enough to study with a couple of times told us that “you’re only as good as your reference”. I have found that to be absolutely true. Every time I’ve been able to upgrade my camera equipment or how I view my reference, my paintings have shown immediate improvement. You can’t put in what’s not there unless you know the subject extremely well. Trust me on this. The biggest leap for me was going from film to digital, which let me move from prints to the equivalent of big transparencies. I’m slowly purging my photo print reference of all the kinda-sorta images that I know aren’t good enough.

Impala painting from photos shot during my 1999 trip to Kenya; flat as a piece of paper with everything in local color
my main reference photo; notice the absolute lack of any perceivable light source
Thompson's Gazelle; no hint of a background, but you know there's light because of that cast shadow on the neck

Exercise: Go through your reference, in whatever format, with a fresh eye. Ask yourself- How much work will it take to make this into something? Does it really represent what it was that caused me to take the picture in the first place? Is it blurry? (I tend to keep those because there still might be a hoof or other information that I can use, but I don’t use blurry images for primary reference. Or let’s just say that every time I’ve done it, I’ve regretted it.) Is it under- or over-exposed? How about the lighting? Is it interesting? Or is it flat?

4. Start a sketchbook- You know you “should”. One of my teachers in art school did a lot of storyboard work for major San Francisco ad agencies. High pay, super short deadlines, no time to shoot reference. He did a drawing a day besides whatever work he had. While I was in his class, we all did a drawing a day. I had fun using my favorite felt tip pens and also Berol color sticks, which were new for me. So it was a chance to try different media, too.

Table and chair; not easy to get the perspective right
But no one says it has to be literally realistic
I tend to do this kind of drawing with carbon or charcoal pencils in the studio, but still use felt pens on location

Exercise: For one week, do a drawing a day. Of anything. You can set up a still life, draw furniture, work from magazine photos. With any media. But draw. Then add a second week. See what happens. Send me a 500 pixel jpg of your favorite and I’ll post them here.

5. Dream your dreams- Blue sky time. If resources, monetary and otherwise, were not a factor, what would you be doing as an artist? Some of us want to paint full-time, which I am fortunate enough to be able to do. Others want a special place in their home where they can do their art or want to go to a workshop or travel to Italy or…..the possibilities are as endless as the ways artists express themselves.

Dream big, but don't miss the stuff that might be close by

Exercise: Set aside an evening and make a list. Try to be specific. Instead of just “workshop”, how about “I want to study plein air painting with…..”? Or not just “I want to travel”, but “I want to go to Kenya and see wild lions”. Then think about what steps you can take to achieve one or more of your dreams. Get on the internet and see what you can learn about how other artists have achieved their dreams, both for inspiration or ideas.

So, there you have it. Five ideas and look! It’s April already!

New Painting! “After The Race; Baga Gazriin Chuluu”

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There’s this saying about combat flying- hours of boredom interspersed with moments of stark terror. At a far less dramatic level, painting seems to have a similar rhythm sometimes. We spend days or weeks working on paintings and, suddenly, some get finished, signatures go on, photos are taken and, ta da. we’re ready to move on. I finished this painting a couple of days after the one I posted last Friday.

This piece is a scene from the mountain blessing ceremony that I had the good fortune to attend at Baga Gazriin Chuluu. There had already been an anklebone shooting competition, but the horse race was the event that everyone dropped what they were doing for. The Buddhist monks who had been sitting in a tent, chanting, came out and joined their families and friends. For at least a hour before the race, the kids had been warming up the horses by walking them in a big circle, sometimes singing as they rode round and round.

The horses were two-year olds, all stallions. As it turns out the Mongol word for horse, “mor” includes the fact that the horse in an ungelded male. That’s the default. Then there are geldings and mares. Being young colts, the race was a short distance- 7km. (The main national Naadam race for fully adult horses is 56km.) As with all Mongol horse races, after warm-ups the jockeys rode their mounts out to the starting line at a walk or trot, followed by a few vehicles which I assume included the starter and some of the trainers.

Everyone went out of sight behind a large rock formation. We all waited at the finish line, a small pile of rocks which held up a pole that had a colorful red scarf flying from it like a flag.

Horse race with spectators, Baga Gazriin Chuluu, July 2009

Pretty soon the crowd stirred and, looking out, we could see the dust from the horses. In just another minute or two they started to reach the finish line. I got as many pictures as I could.

The trainers checked the horses over and some scrapped the sweat off them, although none were lathered up or even looked particularly tired. Then the jockeys spent most of the next hour circling the wrestling competition, cooling down their mounts. That’s when I got the image I used in this painting.

I’ve also included the reference photos since I think too many animal artists just use whatever setting the animal is in when the picture was taken and don’t consider other options. In this case, the background was pretty boring. But, a short distance away were these really great rock formations.

The young rider:

The background:Put them together and….

After The Race, Baga Gazriin Chuluu 16x20" oil on canvasboard

The rocks were deliberately placed so that the boy would be against the large shadow area. I kept things on a diagonal so that the background would be at a different angle from the main subject and keep the composition from being too static. After going 14km, the rider was still having to pull firmly to keep his mount at a walk. I wanted all the elements of the painting to support that pent-up energy.

New Painting Debut! “Choidog and Black”

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In September of 2008, my husband and I went together to Mongolia. One of the places we stayed at was Arburds Sands ger camp. It turned into one of the most memorable experiences that I’ve had in Mongolia because we were invited to a foal branding. The post on that is here.

I got a lot of great pictures, including some of the family patriarch, Choidog. He is a famous horse trainer who won the national Naadam horse race three times in the 1960s. During socialist times, he and the other herdsmen were only allowed to have 75 horses. Twenty years after the changeover to a parliamentary democracy, he has between 300 and 400. I suspect he thinks that’s just about right, but even by horse-loving Mongol standards, it’s a lot.

I decided recently that I wanted to start painting not just the Mongol horses, but their riders, too. And where better to start than with a man who is now 80 years old, who still rides every day and whose life has been dedicated to horses?

Choidog and Black 18x24" oil on canvasboard

As much as they love their horses, Mongols do not sentimentalize them and don’t give them what we would call “real” names. Choidog is riding his current favorite horse, who is simply called “Khar” or “Black”. Black could take his master 140 km to Ulaanbaatar if necessary, probably without breaking a sweat.

In this painting, Choidog is circling and looking over the horse herd that has been gathered in. Most of the foals are already tied to a picket line, but some of the men are out lassoing the others with urga, a long pole with a loop on the end.

We were told afterward, while sitting in the ger drinking airag with the family and friends, that Choidog had made his boots himself over the previous winter. The toes are upturned, not because it looks cool, but so that when walking (which people like Choidog never do if they can ride), the wearer won’t scuff the earth and damage it. The Mongols learned over a thousand years ago that they had to live with and respect the land in order to survive. Hum….

New Painting, New Drawings And An Interesting Call For Entries

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Sort of an odds and ends Friday as the year winds down. The deep freeze is over here in coastal Humboldt County and it’s back to nice normal rainy weather with nighttime lows in the 40s. I’ve been getting in some good easel time of the past few weeks. Here’s a new argali painting from reference that I shot in July at Gun-Galuut Nature Reserve. I watched this group of rams work their way across the rocky slope for almost an hour. “Uul” is Mongolian for “mountain”.

On The Slopes of Baits Uul, Gun-Galuut 18x24" oil on canvasboard (price on request)

I’ve also decided that I want to paint not just the domestic Mongol horses, but the people who ride them. Which brings me back to wrestling with human figures, as described in an earlier post. I get a better result if I can scan the drawings rather than photograph them and also wanted to really hone in on accuracy, so these are smaller and done with a Sanford Draughting pencil, but on the same vellum bristol (which erases very nicely). The heads ended up being only 3/4″ high, which is pretty small, but it reminded me of a story from art school that I thought I might pass along.

One of my teachers was Randy Berrett, a very good illustrator who chose to work in oils. This was kind of masochistic, in a way, because it added a layer of complexity when he had to ship out a wet painting to meet a deadline. In any case, he was showing some examples of his work in class and one was a really large painting of the signers of the either the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution, I can’t remember which. Someone asked why he painted it so large. Randy’s answer really struck me at the time and has stayed with me. It’s something worth remembering when planning a painting. He said that he wanted the heads to be at least an inch high and that requirement controlled the final size of the painting. I’ve sized more than one painting on the basis of that criteria since then.

The first drawing combined two pieces of reference. One of the horse and one of the man. In the latter, he was in front of the horse’s head. In the former, I didn’t like the pose of the horse. Moving the man back works much better. The sweat from a winning horse is considered to be good luck. There are special scrapers made to remove it.

Scraping the sweat after the race, Baga Gazriin Chuluu
Local herder, Erdene Naadam
Boy on horse, Erdene Naadam

Part of the reason I did the previous two was to see if the images “drew well” and to work on horses coming forward at a 3/4 angle. The final two are head studies, in which the heads are 1 1/2″ from forehead to chin.

Local herder, Erdene Naadam

Local herder, Erdene Naadam

Finally, the folks at Eureka Books in Old Town, Eureka have decided to hold a special art show. Here’s the Call for Entries.

The Big Argali Painting, Part 5

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Spent pretty much all of my easel time on the argali painting this week. I think I’ve got it on track now. I need to do some detail drawings of the horns of all three to make sure I understand their structure and perspective before I begin the final stage on them.

I tried painting the big ram light all over, like my reference of him, yesterday, along with defining his neck and shoulder muscles. Came in this morning and realized that I needed to go back to the original color rough because I’d lost the value contrast I needed and the interesting color variation that the younger rams have on their heads and bodies. So I ended up going in dark over light, which worked just fine.

end of day 10-21-09
end of day 10-21-09

I also added a couple more layers of color to the sky- a light warm and a light cool,  knocked back the right side background with a pale glaze and the left shadow side with an ultramarine blue glaze to cool it down.

This morning I started on the young ram on the left and pretty much have him where I want him. Then I went back to the main ram and repainted him from head to tail.

end of day 10-22-09
end of day 10-22-09

I’m starting to get the light quality I’m after. Next, I believe, will be the left side and foreground rocks to “catch them up” with the rest.