With two commissions and several other projects on the go, it was tough to get traction this summer. I’m also spending a lot of time planning for the Banff Christmas markets that begin in November. As it spans four long weekends, I’ll soon need to figure out how much stock to order.
But first, there are two paintings I want to finish, so I’ll have them available for print and puzzles.
This week, the printed 18″ X24″ stretched canvas of a recently completed commission arrived. I’m delighted with how this painting turned out, and most importantly, so is the client. I’ll deliver it the first week of September when the client visits Canmore. After that, I look forward to sharing it with all of you.
The second commission is coming along nicely. 
But I’ve also been working on the group of bears I’ve been chipping away at for some time now. The original plan for this piece was five adult bears sitting at a log in the woods, like a group of friends hanging out and chatting. I drew six of them separately to give myself options.
However, when I dropped and dragged them together into one image, the digital canvas was very long. A long horizontal canvas has appeal for a canvas or metal print. However, from a commercial perspective, it would limit what I could offer for licensing and paper prints.
To make all five bears fit, with a bit of personal space between each, I’d need to compose them in a way that would leave a lot of space above and below. But that would make their faces much smaller, and I’d have to paint more foliage and background. Or I could stretch them vertically, but then they’d look far too distorted.
This is where working digitally is a blessing. While experimenting with each bear sketch, pushing and warping features, I soon realized another option for this painting. What if I made it a family of bears with older cubs, looking almost like teenagers?
Now, I know nature doesn’t work like this. The father is long gone by the time the cubs are born, which is good because he’d be a significant threat. As for Mom, she chases the cubs away at two or three years old.
I don’t paint reality.
It didn’t take long to fall for this new composition and abandon the old one. A family meant I could group them closer and have more fun with their expressions. Pushing, pulling and warping each of the sketched bears destroyed the initial sketched detail, but I probably would have had to do that for my original vision as well.
The sketches were just templates, and each contributed to this discovery.
Once I was pleased with the group layout, I dropped the layer’s opacity and traced over the shapes and basic features. I did this several times, refining with each pass.
Then, I got to work on the shading, detail, expressions, and character. I do that right up until the end of every painting, as personality is the most essential part and is where I have the most fun. And with this painting, I’ve got five faces to discover instead of one.
This piece seems like a family posing for a Sears portrait or the opening of a sitcom like Family Ties or Growing Pains. I’m going to call it ‘The Grizzlies.’
It reminds me of my great horned owls painting, One in Every Family, which is still a bestseller ten years after I painted it. I had a lot of fun with that painting, and that finished piece didn’t match my initial intent, either. My owls painting won Best in Show at Photoshop World 2014 in Las Vegas, awarding me the camera I still use today to take much of my reference. It’s now a trusted old friend.
There’s still a lot of work to do on this piece. Refining the light and contrast, adding colour to the bears and a lot more detail, but I’ve finally found the spark in this piece. This painting felt like one more thing on the to-do list a couple of weeks ago, but I’m now into it and enjoying the work.
Cheers,
Patrick
Despite the bright sun, I got some shots of the two black bear cubs. There might be inspiration for a painting or two in the few photos I kept, but I will let them simmer and review them in a few months. My mood and circumstances can colour my perception, so shots that don’t inspire me in August might push the right buttons in January.
Although I prefer to take my own reference photos whenever possible, I am not interested in becoming a professional photographer. Connecting the dots between aperture, shutter speed and ISO and understanding how they work together, it just seems like math and bores the hell out of me.
I know that hook because I have it for drawing and painting. I can spend hours detailing little hairs or working to get the texture of a bear’s nose just right. I am confident that would be incredibly dull for most people.
So, while I revel in learning a photography trick or technique that helps me take better reference, like 
At the end of July, on the day I sent 
Though most of Alberta had been dealing with heavy wildfire smoke that week, it completely cleared up by the time I got to the cabin and stayed that way the whole four days we were there. The temperature even dropped to a comfortable level and we got some welcome rain. In fact, on the first night, it cooled off so much that we wondered if we might need a fire in the wood stove. Given the oppressive heat we’d just escaped, we had no appetite for that. But wearing long pants and a hoodie seemed strange that evening, given how uncomfortable the past month had been.
Even though I couldn’t turn off my busy brain, it was good to get away. We did what we always do: sat around talking, napped on the decks in the afternoon, walked around the large property, and played guitar, cards and Scrabble. Yes, we’re boring old men.
It was a very pretty and delightfully cool morning, and I knew there would be plenty of time to nap on the deck later in the day, so my mood improved. I wandered up the road, spooked a few deer and watched them take off across the neighbour’s newly cut and bailed hayfield. I kept my eyes peeled for other wildlife, hoping for an owl or coyote.
The base of the tree she ran up to escape was twenty feet below me down the steep bank, so her ‘safe height’ now put her at eye level with me as I stood on the road. And she was NOT happy about it.
Though I had done what I could to boost my exposure compensation to account for the dark area in which I was shooting, I needed to keep the shutter speed high to try to capture this quick little marten. In the end, none of the pictures I got were very good, but I enjoyed the moment. I don’t know if I have ever seen a pine marten in the wild, but I was pleased with the early morning treat.
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Over the past week, I’ve received a few 
This past Sunday, I had drawn two cartoons in the morning and was going to paint all afternoon. Then President Biden announced he was no longer running for re-election, and suddenly, I had to draw a new cartoon for Monday morning. While drawing each cartoon takes a few hours or more, I first have to come up with the idea, which also takes time.
Adjusting course, I planned to paint all day Tuesday but woke to find out that the town of Jasper had evacuated for a wildfire. Suddenly, I had to scrap the cartoon I’d already drawn and sent Monday afternoon for the 
Having been through an evacuation in 2013 (water, not fire), and the odds are a little too good we may one day go through that again; I feel for those people. It’s a frightening thing to leave your home and not know if will be there when you get back. As the fire has breached the town of Jasper, and structures are burning, some people will lose everything. What makes it worse is when insensitive, small-minded keyboard warriors post stupid things like, “It’s only stuff.”
I have several paintings in progress, a few I expected to be done by now, which is frustrating. Because each features several animals, they take much longer, contributing to the feeling I’m not producing enough finished work.
In the meantime, I hope you’re having a good summer despite the oppressive heat and wildfire smoke in some places. After a cool and comfortable rainy June, our July has sucked up all the moisture, and our brown grass and crispy trees could use some precipitation.
Because of my current workload and deadlines, I haven’t been able to get away for reference photos lately. Shonna and I want to see our families and visit 
When I got to the new polar bear habitat, I was surprised to find both bears sparring with each other in their smaller splash pool. They have a much larger pool, but this was clearly where they wanted to be. Baffin and Siku seemed to be having a great time, wrestling, biting, and pushing each other under the water.
Though I have just finished a polar bear painting and haven’t time to start another one, I took plenty of references for future projects.
Finally, at the other end of the zoo, I caught the red pandas awake and playful and took photos that will no doubt inspire paintings down the road. One had found a perch high in a tree, balanced over a branch, in a comically lazy pose. There’s painting potential there.
After only a couple of hours, I was more than ready to head home, sort through the pics, and finish drawing an 
I dropped off a large print and sticker order to the 
Titles are challenging. While I prefer to come up with something funny or endearing for each painting, I also need to consider my clients and their customers. Simple identifying titles are often better, especially as my portfolio grows. I already have two polar bear paintings 
The paintings I was already working on need to be done by the end of next month so I can order puzzles and products for the markets. Then there are the sketches, paintings and writing for the book, six editorial 
Sure, I’ll bitch about being too busy sometimes, but I chose this. Though the landscape will change, as will the work, and it’s unlikely ever to get easier, I plan to create art as long as possible. I don’t know if I could do anything else, now.
I’m grateful for so many of you who follow my work, comment on my posts or write emails, sending me wildlife pictures and thoughts about something I’ve shared or the artwork in general. With so much content available to us, that anyone volunteers to receive my
This photo always makes me chuckle. That evil-looking stare straight down my lens, the squinting focused eyes, the chunk missing from her ear. She reminds me of a gangster saying, “Come closer. See what happens.”
I’m happy with how it’s turned out so far, and I’m also hoping to offer the finished piece as a puzzle later this year.
So, when I’m working on several paintings at once and more involved pieces featuring multiple animals or more detailed backgrounds, paintings that take much longer than a whimsical head and shoulders portrait can be uncomfortable. It feels like I’m not getting enough done.
The finished piece will be a lot more detailed than the images in progress you see here. But the vision for what I’m trying to achieve is clear in my mind, and I’m having fun discovering each of these faces.
I rarely visit the 
Parks Canada officials would have euthanized Bear #16 in 1996, but the Calgary Zoo had an opening, and he has lived there ever since. In the wild, a male grizzly doesn’t live far past his 20s. Skoki is now 37 years old. He is an old bear and looks it, but despite obvious age-related deficiencies, he’s healthy.
One day in June last year, after dropping off prints, I found Skoki active again. I followed him around his large enclosure until he did something I’d never seen before. He walked the length of a log until he came to a larger log that crossed it. He straddled the one on which he’d been walking and put his paws up on the crossed log. He looked like he’d just bellied up to the bar and was waiting for service.
This painting has been rattling around in my noggin for quite a while, and I’ve drawn several sketches, including the ones in this post. All the reference I’m using for this work in progress is Skoki, but I’ll make the five bears different heights, weights and colour variations so they don’t all look like the same bear. Other photo references will help me do that, and I’m planning more sketches like these to explore my options.
I started one of these Skoki sketches a little while ago and figured I’d try a full pose of how he sat that day. Before I knew it, I had drawn more detail and realized the image below was becoming its own painting.
Because I don’t paint a lot of backgrounds in my work, I’ll often begin some paintings in grayscale so I can get the light, shadows and contrast right. Later, I can add colour using various techniques I’ve discovered in over twenty years of digital painting.
We stayed up waiting for the northern lights Friday, but with none arriving by 11, we retreated to our separate spaces. I’m indeed one of the old guys now.
The next morning, I admitted that just before I knocked on a dark, quiet trailer, I wondered if I was painting a target on my chest. Nobody likes to be woken from a dead sleep. Thankfully, all agreed it was worth it. After all, that’s what Saturday afternoon lawn chair naps are for.
On Saturday, several hummingbirds made rounds at three or four feeders Babe and Sue have around their home. Having never before captured decent shots of these tiny speedsters, I must have learned a few things over the years as I came home with several potential reference photos, more than you see here.
While these photos are edited, of course, that convenient red background is Babe’s little barn garage for his trailer, as a couple of the hummingbirds landed and sat on the safety wire surrounding the deck of the house.
My first instinct is to paint several of these poses, a line of little hummingbirds on the same wire, and devise my own vibrant colour scheme for each bird. I’m sure that seems like sacrilege to any hardcore birders, but my art doesn’t represent reality. I guess I’ll see what happens when I get into it, whenever that might be.
Regardless of how or when I paint from these pics, I enjoyed stalking the quick little critters. The best part about taking wildlife photos strictly for reference is that it doesn’t matter if the backgrounds or lighting aren’t great. Where a wildlife photographer might not see an image worthy of sharing or printing, all I care about is the detail and whether it inspires a possible painting or two.
And that’s my cue to head back to the drawing board. Next time, I’ll have some new artwork to share, or at least some works in progress.
