About a month ago, Shonna was able to take a couple of days off, and we drove to Red Deer to see our parents and spend a little time at Discovery Wildlife Park. A scorching and bright sunny day, less than ideal for photos; we only spent a couple of hours at the park. But we got to visit with our friend, Serena, and meet the baby orphaned raccoon she was looking after.
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’ve read plenty of books, watched videos and taken classes, but I’ve never got ‘the hook,’ that thing where you connect to something on a level that makes you want to pour all your energy into becoming better at it.
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.
I admire plenty of photographers whose artistic skills inspire and baffle me. The art they create and capture is impressive. But when I see their work, I don’t think, “I want to do that!”
What I do think is, “I want to see a coastal grizzly walking out of a Vancouver Island rainforest!” or “Yeah, that’s a beautiful shot of a bald eagle grabbing a salmon, but I’m gonna need a closer zoom of that face to see her expression.”
I love the experience of taking photos, especially when it involves critter faces. I paint personality in my images because that’s what I see. I instinctually imagine animals as characters, and the twitch of a lip or crease in an eye ridge suddenly becomes an anthropomorphized expression I can exaggerate.
So, while I revel in learning a photography trick or technique that helps me take better reference, like David DuChemin’s tip this winter that allowed me to capture much better detail shooting ravens in the snow, I’m always thinking about the painting.
If I take a photo where the light isn’t great, and I can’t fix it well enough in Photoshop, a picture that would easily be in the discard pile for a professional photographer might still inspire a painting. My Smiling Tiger is a bestselling image, and I based it on a blurry, grainy reference photo I captured at The Calgary Zoo. Any self-respecting photographer would have deleted it on the first pass.
While I consider taking photos an integral part of my creative pipeline, that’s only the beginning.
At the end of July, on the day I sent my last post, I headed to the cabin north of here with my friend, Darrel. With my current workload, time off hasn’t been a priority, so leaving for a few days felt irresponsible, but we had booked it months ago and paid our deposit.
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.
With the developing situation in Jasper, evacuees finding out that 30% of their town had burned down, it was impossible to completely relax or shut off the news. The weather reports warned of the potential for tornadoes and violent storms in our area due to the rapidly changing temperatures. Thankfully, those never materialized, but it still meant keeping one eye on the phone.
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.
While I slept well the first couple of nights, I had bad dreams the last two. On the third morning, I woke up from one about 5:30 and tried and failed to go back to sleep. Darrel and I are both early risers, and while I’m up before then most days at home, I like to sleep a couple of hours longer at the cabin. So, I wasn’t impressed.
Though we have separate bedrooms, it’s a small cabin, and I didn’t want to risk ruining Darrel’s sleep by moving about that early. I quietly dressed, grabbed my camera and crept out the back door for a walk.
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.
At the top of the long dirt road is a treed area that falls away to forest on both sides. That time of morning, that section of road was dark and shaded. I briefly saw a long, little critter standing tall on its hind legs on the side of the road before it squealed and ran down the steep bank to the forest floor below. I don’t know the critter’s gender, but with a 50/50 shot, I’m going with she instead of it.
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.
But I was thrilled, shooting pics of this sassy little pine marten as she grunted and squealed at me. She didn’t seem to know if she should climb higher or go back down. After a few back-and-forth scurries, with pauses to glare at me and curse my existence, she opted for down and made her escape.
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.
While the pics I got aren’t good enough for reference, I’ve added a pine marten to the list of animals I hope to encounter on future cabin visits.
I’m certain she feels differently.
Cheers,
Patrick
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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 
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.
If your art becomes popular enough that people like it, share it and buy it, somebody will steal it. Some creatives stamp ugly watermarks across every image they post to try to combat this, but what’s the point if you need to go that far?
Several years ago, my friend Kathryn alerted me to a woman on Vancouver Island using my Otter painting as the logo for her business. It was on her business cards, a sidewalk sandwich board, window decals and advertising. When I called the owner on it, she said she Googled ‘royalty-free images’ and my otter came up. I asked if Mickey Mouse had come up in that search, would she think Disney would allow her to use him as her logo? My signature is still on the image on that sign! She angrily told me I was being unreasonable and said if I had been nicer, we could have come to an arrangement.
Another company in the same area had my Moose and Grizzly Bear paintings on their chocolate-covered candy labels sold in a local store. The company’s owner in Eastern Canada said they’d hired a graphic designer to make the labels. He just stole my work online and passed it off as his own.
From what I’ve found, she stole my Coyote, Grizzly, Black Bear, Moose, Squirrel, Peanuts and Smiling Tiger paintings, but likely more than that. While the first five are no longer bestsellers, and a couple are even retired, my Smiling Tiger and Peanuts paintings are two of my most popular, bestselling and frequently licensed images.
After a whole career dealing with this kind of thing, I am firm-footed in ‘fool me twice’ territory. Her reply almost stopped me from writing this post, but she’s standing proudly in that photo with six large canvases of an art style I’ve spent years developing. And 24 hours after her apology, my work is still visible on her social media with mentions of her amazing paintings. Very sincere.
The difficulty with commission work is that, aside from advertising the work to future clients, there is no market for the finished paintings. Most people don’t want a portrait of somebody else’s dog; they want one of their own. And when I’m working on a custom painting, that’s time away from everything else. So, a commissioned painting is an investment for both the client and the artist.
Each client and commission is different, and specific details often make a painting more fun. Chase was a retired police dog in California with a titanium tooth. It was important to the client that the tooth was evident in the piece.
In 2022, my booth location was up in the air until the day of the show, and it was stressful. At first, I didn’t get the type of booth I booked and I needed to address that. Following that, when I got there, one list said I was in one spot and another in a different spot. I couldn’t even unload my car. While I empathized with the organizers’ difficulty trying to please everybody, I still paid a premium for my corner booth, and I had to become the squeaky wheel with emails during the week leading up to the show. I am sure I annoyed the organizers when I became frustrated and could no longer be patient and keep quiet.
Two more aisles of booths are in that hall this year, so it looks like a bigger show. Between the Main Hall and the Main Stage Hall is a corridor through which all traffic comes and goes. My corner booth is at the end of an aisle, within easy view of everyone coming through that corridor. Below was my booth design last year and it worked so well that I will use the same one this year, only reversed, and with a bunch of new artwork, of course.
The organizers are likely pulling their hair out two weeks out, trying to get everything done. No doubt, when they announce booth placements, they receive emails from people who didn’t get what they wanted or those politicking for a last-minute change.
This painting has been rattling around in my noggin for some time. I think I first had the idea at the Calgary Zoo when I saw Skoki, the grizzly bear, sitting in one of his ponds, playing with something floating on the water.
Eventually, it comes together, the personality shows up, and it turns into an enjoyable pursuit rather than a frustrating one. What was at first a slog, seeming like hours of no progress, ended up to be work I didn’t want to stop.
