Tag: Calgary Zoo

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Stocked for Christmas, Stuck with Canada Post

It’s with mixed feelings that I can say most of my stock for the Banff Christmas Market has arrived.

My restock of metal prints came in last week, along with a large order from Art Ink Print in Victoria, who handle my 11×14 poster prints. That shipment included both my own stock for the four Banff Market long weekends and a big order for the Calgary Zoo, which I delivered on Wednesday.
Each of my poster prints is hand-signed, and the Zoo got the very first print of my latest Snowy Owl painting. It’s always a nice feeling to see a new piece in print for the first time.

Another large order from Pacific Music & Art arrived yesterday. They’ve licensed my work for several years on a wide range of products. People often tell me they’ve seen my art in stores across Alberta, BC, Alaska, and the Pacific Northwest. Those are all Pacific products.
They also produce the calendar many of you look forward to each year. That means I get to sell my own artist edition while the same calendar reaches stores I could never reach myself. Some of you on Vancouver Island have even told me you already picked up your 2026 calendar before I got mine.
If you’ve ever bought a magnet or coaster from me at the Calgary Expo or the Banff Christmas Market, those are Pacific items, too. I already had several designs in stock, but yesterday’s delivery topped up my inventory for the market.
So yes, you have to spend money to make money, but placing large orders like these is a serious expense, often weeks or months ahead of actually selling anything. Anyone who’s ever kept retail inventory knows the feeling. It’s something I never get used to and it puts me on edge.

That’s the “mixed” part.

While I’m happy with this year’s calendar order and confident in my usual sales projections, the Canada Post labour dispute has thrown a wrench in everything. Normally, early calendar sales through my online store help offset these upfront costs.

Announced late last night, as of Saturday, Oct. 11, Canada Post is moving from a nationwide strike to rotating strikes, which should get some mail moving again, just not reliably. So for now, my online store will stay closed until I see what happens. But until Canada Post proves this isn’t just a temporary pause before another shutdown, I can’t risk taking online orders that might end up stuck in limbo. I’ll plan to reopen by late October. My last outstanding order, custom tote bags featuring my Christmas Bear painting, has shipped from Montreal by courier and is scheduled to arrive next week. Thankfully, that one’s unaffected and on track.

Like every other small business caught up in this dispute, I just have to wait and hope for a resolution soon… or find a way to make this year’s Christmas sales work despite it all.

So yeah, I’ve been angry and stressed. I won’t pretend otherwise. Even with rotating strikes, which should get some mail moving again, the uncertainty means gritting my teeth, clenching my jaw, and trying to accept what I can’t change while working on what I can.

On a brighter note, I’m currently working on a dog commission that’s been a welcome distraction. I’d love to focus on that full-time for a week, but for now, the editorial cartooning is paying the bills until the wildlife paintings can contribute again. And thankfully, with each Canada Post strike and job action having taught hard lessons, all of my newspapers now pay by direct deposit.
I’m also creating a project for Wacom, featuring their new Movink Pad 11, hands down the best mobile drawing experience I’ve had. Full stop. I’ll share more about it in an upcoming video, which includes outdoor sketching footage. Above is a preview: a small practice piece I’m working on to get comfortable with the included software.

Thankfully, I’ve got a short cabin trip coming up with my buddy Darrel, something we booked a while ago. It’s a pre-market reset before the long haul through November and December. I’m looking forward to a few days of quiet: playing cards, Scrabble and guitar, napping on the deck, and wandering the pastures with my camera in search of wildlife. Fall is my favourite time of year there.
Here in Canmore, we got our first snowfall last Saturday. Most of it melted in the valley by Sunday afternoon, but the mountains stayed white for a few days longer. If this isn’t the best view from any Safeway in Canada, it’s at least in the top three. Helps (a little) to soften the shock of the ridiculous grocery prices around here.
But I was biking my errands in shorts again yesterday and snapped this pic of Policeman’s Creek.

Back to work.

Cheers,
Patrick

If you missed the video I created about the Alberta Birds of Prey Centre and the creation of my most recent Snowy Owl, here it is again.


 

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The Ringleader

Some paintings come together easily. A reference photo may immediately inspire an idea, I’ll sit down and mock up sketches, and it will almost feel like the image creates itself.

This was NOT one of those paintings.

I’ve had more than a few frustrating experiences painting where the work didn’t seem to want to come together. I’ve beaten myself up about it, wrung my hands and thought, “Well, I used to know how to do this; I guess I don’t anymore.”

Eventually, I’ve made it through, and some of those paintings became bestsellers.
This painting has been something entirely different. Even though I had a clear idea of what I wanted it to look like, I couldn’t get it to feel right. It was inspired by a photo I took at the Calgary Zoo, and I even had the name of the piece before I painted the first brushstroke.

I came very close to calling this piece finished a couple of months ago. But I showed it to my artist friend Derek, who kindly told me what I already knew. It wasn’t working. The faces were laid out too uniformly, like a tic-tac-toe grid, and the personality wasn’t there.

So I went back to the beginning, discarding dozens of hours of work to start over again. The difference this time, however, was that I looked at it as one piece containing several characters rather than several characters I created separately and then assembled into one piece.
The first go round, I used a specific reference for each lemur I painted and drew them all individually. Even after I assembled them, I kept going back to the individual references for each, and it wasn’t easy to keep track of it all. I made it far too complicated.

When I started over, I abandoned the individual reference. I focused on the expressions and characters without worrying about making each look like a specific reference because I didn’t need it. Lemurs are lemurs; they don’t look all that different from each other. As long as the central character had the most personality, the others were the supporting cast, even though their details were still necessary.
The key to getting this piece back on track was to stop painting individual trees and just paint the forest. Even though this was a challenging painting, with a lot of redrawing and direction changes, I learned from the frustration. These kinds of lessons always contribute to better work in the future.

On Marc Maron’s WTF podcast this week, director James Mangold talked about lessons he has learned in filmmaking. He said that even though you need to start with a plan, if you hold it too tightly, you don’t leave any room for discovery in the process.

The finished piece still doesn’t quite match my original inspiration and vision. And while there are still the same nine lemurs as before, they’re more dynamic in their placement, different angles, placed higher and lower. There are more tails here and there, and I added hands for the ringleader as the central character.

But when I spend too much time with a painting, I can’t see it with fresh eyes anymore, so I don’t know if it’s any good.

What’s worse is that January and February are tough for me, as they are for many people. We’ve been enduring a period of bitter cold the past couple of weeks, and that always sucks the life out of me. I’ve forced myself to go for a few hikes and bundled-up bike rides to get out of the house and exercise, but it’s been a slog.

It’s also a time of year when I spend a lot of money on my business. From the final 50% booth installment for The Calgary Expo, the deposit for registering for the Banff Christmas Market, my first quarterly tax installment, paying for new promotional items, test prints for new products, plus restocking prints for anticipated spring client orders and Expo, and all the materials that go with that, it’s a part of self-employed stress I never get used to. It’s a maxim as old as time that you must spend money to make money, but nothing is guaranteed, so it’s always uncomfortable.

Finally, with the editorial cartoon side of my work, I must follow the deluge of bad news that breaks daily because he-who-shall-not-be-named continues his insane barrage of verbal and economic attacks on Canada. As much as I’d like to turn off the news to preserve my sanity, I can’t do that and still do my job.

All of this, aside from the 51st-state bullshit, is business as usual for this time of year. But when it piles on, it usually puts me in a pretty dark place.
Under these circumstances, my perception of how any finished piece looks is distorted. I have no idea how I feel about this painting and probably won’t for a while. I feel more relief that it’s finally over than satisfaction with the result.

I’ve done several paintings in my career where I’ve felt indifference for them upon completion but grew to love them over time. Maybe this will be one of those, but I have no way to know. Artists tend to put too much pressure on themselves and make more out of their work than they should, and I am no exception. Ultimately, it’s just a painting of some funny-looking lemurs, and I have spent enough time on it.

“Art is never finished, only abandoned.”

Nobody knows if Leonardo da Vinci really said it, but it’s an oft-repeated quote because of how much it resonates with artists, that there is always room for improvement, and perfection isn’t possible.

With that in mind, I’m moving on and will start a new painting in a day or two.

Cheers,
Patrick

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Polar Plunge

In June of last year, I painted my Big Bear on Blue polar bear painting, which is now a popular print. Pacific Music & Art used it as the cover of their 2025 calendar featuring my artwork. I like that painting and didn’t feel the need to create another polar bear image, at least not right away.

In July of last year, however,  I shared the following sketch painting, the term I use for unfinished experiments. Because I had just painted a polar bear, I didn’t see the need to take it any further.
But it had received a positive response, and a few people sent me emails asking if I would finish it. So, over the last week, I put the time in to complete it, and I think Polar Plunge will be a nice addition to my print releases for spring.

At the beginning of this year, I spent a few days looking through unfinished paintings. There are a couple I had forgotten about that I’d now like to dust off and complete, and I’d like to finish as many paintings in progress as I can before I start anything new.

I also created a 2025 list of folders with reference files, so I don’t have to wonder what’s coming next.

There’s always a short-lived high whenever I finish a painting. Years ago, it used to last for a week. Now, it lasts for about an hour, followed by a bit of a crash, for anywhere from a couple of days to a week. If I look through my reference files during that post-painting hangover, hoping to find the next idea, nothing inspires me.

This year, I decided to eliminate that problem. Art for a living is a job, and when one painting is finished, I need to start another, regardless of whether I feel like it. Thankfully, I now have 28 new folders containing reference images for paintings I can start right away. Some are paintings I need to finish, like the group of ring-tailed lemurs I’ve been working on. As I complete a painting, I’ll choose another folder and start the next one. And even if I’m not ‘feeling it,’ that will pass soon enough as I get into the new piece, because lost in the details of a painting is about as happy as I get.

I have never painted that many images in a year, but that’s not the goal. I simply now have 28 options and no excuses not to start a new piece.

When I’m not feeling especially creative, it helps to think of each painting as a commission. When clients pay me to paint their pets, I have a deadline or know that I’m wasting their time and money if I don’t work on their painting. Guilt is a strong motivator.

I’m trying to shift my perspective regarding my own paintings where I’m the client, and by not working, I’m wasting my own time and potential revenue.

I’m also working to create a new portfolio this year to attract new licensing clients. Even though many of my licenses aren’t exclusive, some companies are still reluctant to use an image on similar products if another company uses it, even if the market conflict is minimal. Anything can happen, and relying on only a few clients risks future income security. The loss of newspaper clients in recent years illustrates that point well.

While editorial cartooning is still a large part of my business, newspapers have experienced a steady decline for years, so it no longer provides a full-time income on its own. If I hadn’t had the whimsical wildlife side of my business, which is now the most significant portion of my income, I would have had to get a part-time job a few years ago.
Last week, I delivered the year’s first print and sticker order to the Calgary Zoo. It was warm, with plenty of sunshine, and there weren’t many people. Even traffic was light, so I had an enjoyable day. When I got there, I chatted with the retail manager and the staff I know, then wandered through Canadian Wilds, my favourite part of the zoo.

I texted my friend Kayla, one of the zookeepers, asking if she was working and where she was. She said she was in the North American porcupine enclosure, so I went there. Kayla was one of those who asked me if I was ever going to complete this new polar bear painting, so I was happy to tell her the finished painting was imminent.
Porcupines are nocturnal, so they’re not active during the day, but like any animal, they’ll make an effort when food is involved. Because Kayla was inside the enclosure, feeding the cute and prickly resident, we had a nice chat while I got some decent reference shots. Add those to the ones I’ve taken at Discovery Wildlife Park, and there is now a Porcupine folder in my list of paintings I’d like to get to this year.

Though I took many more photos of different animals that day, most weren’t worth keeping. Bright sunny days and photography don’t usually mix. No matter how you compensate with camera settings, the lights end up too bright, the shadows too dark, and you can only fix so much in Photoshop. The sun is also low in the sky this time of year, which doesn’t help.

Normally, I’d be disappointed, but there have been plenty of days I’ve come home with dozens of shots worth keeping, and it often takes me years to get to them. And as I’ve explained, I have no shortage of paintings to get to this year. Hey, I delivered an order to one of my best customers, got out of the office, and had a nice day outside in the middle of winter. I have no complaints.

While I’ve recorded the occasional high-speed video for YouTube, it’s been quite a while, and I want to get back to using that platform to help promote my work. I’ve been spending a lot of time lately learning to use new recording software and hardware. Something many artists don’t realize when they want to turn their hobby into their work is that the business and promotion side of self-employment requires constant adaptation and continuing education. While it takes time away from creating art, it’s necessary for career longevity. Just because something worked well ten years ago, doesn’t mean it will today.

While I’m learning the ropes of these new tools and preparing to create more videos, I’ve got a few more paintings in progress to complete, and as I do, I look forward to sharing them with you.

Cheers,
Patrick

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The Grizzlies

“How long does it take you to paint one of these?”

It’s one of the most common questions I get.

Do I include all the time and travel? Taking, sorting and editing reference photos? How about sketches and roughs? What about the paintings where I took the reference a few years ago but wasn’t inspired by them until much later?

I’ve never completed a painting in one sitting. It’s usually one or two hours at a time. When I’m not painting, I draw editorial cartoons, do my bookkeeping, admin work, format and order products, email clients, and try to have a life, none of which is on a schedule. Sometimes, I start a painting and don’t return to it for a week. Right now, I have at least five paintings in different stages of completion.

So, technically, I have no idea how long it really takes to complete each painting.

But rather than bore a market booth customer with a complicated, existential answer to a simple question, I usually ballpark it and say, “Somewhere around 15 or 20 hours.”

I don’t know if that’s more or less than what they expected.
The spark for this painting was reference photos I took at the Calgary Zoo in June of 2023. I enjoyed watching long-time grizzly resident Skoki straddle a log while resting his arms on another log across it. It reminded me of somebody bellying up to a bar to order a drink.

He sat there for a good long while and I took dozens of photos of him turning this way and that. The painting that first came to mind was four or five grizzlies sitting at the log, like buddies at the bar. I even figured I might call it Grizzly Bar.
I did some drawings shortly after that and returned to them whenever I had the time. While Skoki was the inspiration, I used several bears in my photo archive as reference for the bodies and faces. If nothing else, I figured they would be good sketches for the book I’ve been talking about for years, but to my eternal shame, never deliver.
Once I had several sketches, I pieced them together, trying to find a composition I liked. The five grizzly bear buddies soon became five members of a family. It reminded me of a grizzly bear version of a Sears family portrait photo shoot. Refining the shapes so they fit together, and reimagining the expressions meant losing a lot of the sketch detail I had already drawn, but that’s just part of the process.
Many paintings begin as one idea but take on their own life while I work. I have no idea how many hours I’ve put into this piece, but it’s more than any painting before.
Rather than work in colour from the start, as with other paintings, I started this one in greyscale because I wanted to play with the values and experiment with the scene. Once I had a good starting point, I painted colour in the background and foreground, leaving the grizzlies for last.

I’ll confess I don’t much like painting landscapes or scenery, so I wanted to get that out of the way to get to the part I love most — the bears, of course.
Initially, the berries in the foreground were bright red. But when I showed this work-in-progress image to my buddy, Derek, at Electric Grizzly Tattoo, he suggested they might be a distraction from the bears. It was a helpful critique. So, I toned down the berries and made them a deeper burgundy and blue.
As brown bears come in many shades, from dark brown to red to blonde, I had initially planned to have a more noticeable colour difference between the five. But it looked weird, and I didn’t like it, so I erred on the side of more subtle variations in fur colour.
One of the nice things about working digitally is that at the end of each painting session, I can look back at the image when I opened the file and compare it to progress at the end of a session. It’s often a big difference, and that’s satisfying. However, when a painting nears completion, two hours of work may be barely noticeable before and after. That’s usually how I know it’s time to call it done.

For you digital painters, this was a very big file with a lot of detail. The finished dimensions are  30″X40″ at 300ppi. Near the end of this piece, with seven layers, the working file size was over 1.5GB. Thankfully my computer can handle it, but I still closed and reopened the program every half hour or so to prevent any lag. With a file this big, a crash can happen and losing an hour of work is a real risk.
Deciding whether I like a piece or not takes time, but I’m pretty happy with how this turned out. I liked my Meerkat piece when I finished it, but it took four weeks of it hanging on the grid wall beside me at The Banff Christmas Market before I realized it’s one of my personal favourites.
Because of the current uncertain economy, I’m not yet committing to doing puzzles again right away. But when I do, I think this grizzly family is worthy of consideration.

What do you think? Let me know in the comments.

Cheers,
Patrick

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Polar Bears and Red Pandas

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 Discovery Wildlife Park, but her workload has been ridiculous this summer, so getting away has been challenging. I also meant to get down to Coaldale to the Alberta Birds of Prey Centre this spring, but that didn’t work out. Hopefully, I can get there before their season wraps at the end of August.

I drove to the Calgary Zoo on Tuesday to deliver a large print and sticker order. I was glad to get it done early in the week as the city is about to get very busy with the Canada Day long weekend, followed by the Calgary Stampede later next week.

With plenty of school groups on field trips this time of year and attendance high with the warmer weather, I didn’t expect to spend long at the zoo. But I brought my camera, just in case.

Within five minutes, I was ready to go. I’m not a fan of crowds, especially those made up of children. There’s something about that high-pitched, sugar-powered screaming that triggers my flight response.

If a foreign power ever tried to get me to reveal state secrets, they’d only have to suggest chaining me to a chair in a daycare, and I’d tell them everything. It’s a good thing I know absolutely nothing of value.

For those who keep suggesting it, I have no interest in drawing a children’s book.

But because I was already at the zoo, I gritted my teeth and set off to walk the circuit to see what I could see.
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.

As one school group moved on, I parked myself at the edge of the window before the next group could arrive, and for a good ten or fifteen minutes, took photos through the glass of two polar bears, playing ten feet from my lens. I couldn’t have asked for a better vantage point.
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.

Prints of that new piece, Big Bear on Blue, are now available in the store.

My zookeeper friend Kayla had to miss Expo this year, so it was nice to chat with her outside the wolf habitat before she and a colleague introduced some fish-oil-scented enrichment the wolves seemed to enjoy taking apart.
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 editorial cartoon.

As I’ve made a couple of commissions my priority right now, I don’t have any new progress to share on the other pieces I’m painting. Hopefully, I can put some more hours into those this weekend and share some new images next week.

Cheers,
Patrick

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Big Bear on Blue

I dropped off a large print and sticker order to the Calgary Zoo in February. As usual, I wandered with the camera, looking for reference pics. I often come home with surprises that sometimes end up as paintings.

It was the first time I’d had the opportunity to see the new polar bear enclosure with the two residents, Baffin and Siku, who came to Calgary via Winnipeg’s Assiniboine Park Zoo. They had been orphaned as cubs, found wandering near Churchill, Manitoba, by conservation officers who deemed them too young to survive on their own.

According to the Calgary Herald (Nov 30, 2023), “Their new home is a $11.5-million habitat that features two acres of tree-filled meadows, a five-metre-deep plunge pool, a series of dens and rock fixtures, and a shallow pool for the bears to wade in.”

One of the interpretative staff told me there are sections specifically designed to give the bears private time when they want it.

For most animal reference pics, I’m looking for face shots to show the detail I like to paint. I got several unobstructed shots of Baffin lounging on a rock on a sunny winter day, but even with my 300mm lens, I couldn’t get close photos of his face. It can take me years to get the right reference, and even when I have the images, I might not paint from them for a long time. So, I figured I’d try again next time.

Still, I liked some of the pics I took and figured I could do some full-body sketches or rough paintings for practice to include in the bear book.

I often sketch on my iPad in the Procreate app with the Apple pencil, especially for editorial cartoons. When I want to upsize it and draw or paint more detail, I transfer the file to my desktop PC and continue working on it with my Wacom Cintiq 24HD in Photoshop.

Though I never intended this to be a finished piece, I kept returning to it, thinking I’d just put in a little more time. Before I knew it, I had a  new painting.

The northern lights are a common and popular theme in polar bear art, and savvy commercial artists give people what they want.

But for over a decade, I have heard from retailers and customers that they like my art because it’s different and unique. When the first gallery in Banff gave my work a shot more than ten years ago, the manager said that he wouldn’t have been interested, no matter how good they were, had I brought him true to life animal paintings. That’s what everybody else was doing.

While I still featured a version of the northern lights in this piece, I stuck with a blue colour scheme rather than the usual greens and purples for no reason other than that’s what I felt like painting. I love a blue, white and grey palette.
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 on offer, so I decided Big Bear on Blue was a good description and title for this piece. And I liked it better than Polar Bear on Blue, but don’t ask me why.

With several other paintings in progress, I hadn’t intended to slide this painting into the queue. It was a fun discovery that didn’t take as long as I would have thought, and in case you missed it, I’ve got a thing for bears.

Prints are on the way, and I’ll let you know when this piece is available in the store.

Cheers,
Patrick

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Ring-tail Renditions

When the Land of Lemurs exhibit opened at the Calgary Zoo several years ago, I was excited to get up close and personal with these critters. Lemurs are a matriarchal species, meaning the women are in charge. Only females were in residence at the time, but I don’t know if that’s still true.

Because of disagreements in sample size and the territories surveyed, the number of Ring-tailed Lemurs left in the wild is under dispute. However, one thing experts agree on is that the wild population is in severe decline. Deforestation and hunting means lemurs may go extinct in our lifetime.

The World Wildlife Fund and several other conservation organizations work to educate and support communities in Madagascar to help them coexist with lemurs. Unfortunately, colonies in captivity may one day be the only place where lemurs exist.

One of the interesting features of the lemur habitat at the Calgary Zoo is that the lemurs are free-roaming within the enclosure. People must enter through a controlled gate, where an attendant explains the rules. Once inside, other employees and volunteers answer questions while ensuring the safety of the lemurs.

The enclosure design means the lemurs can go where they like, including climbing atop an unsuspecting person who crouches down for something. With no fence or glass, this open concept makes taking photos a real treat.

Early in 2020, before the world shut down, Wacom commissioned me to record a video using their Wacom One display, along with a voice-over narrative I wrote. I recorded a ring-tailed lemur painting for that project, and it’s one of my favourite pieces, mostly because she looks ready to snap. It’s also a popular print with many of my collectors.

I’ve long wanted to create another painting featuring several lemurs, inspired by the following photo I took in 2017. All these lemurs look a little stunned; harmless goofs, not too bright, except for one.
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.”
What can I say, I see cartoon characters in real animals. This is why I paint the way I do.

I have considered this photo and the painting I have wanted to create for years. I even have a title for it: The Ringleader. The finished piece will be 7 or 8 of the goofy, stunned faces filling the canvas, with the sinister ringleader in the middle, staring down the viewer.

The big challenge isn’t painting the faces but making them look like they belong together. That’s why I’m working on seven faces in the same file. The ringleader herself is a separate file that I started earlier this week.

I haven’t yet got to the stage where I compose them into the finished piece, but I’m getting there. Once they’re each in position, I’ll need to paint more hair and fur to blend the faces as they overlap. There won’t be any bodies or paws because this painting is about the faces filling the space, but I will paint a few tails coming in from the sides and bottom.
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.

I’m used to working on one painting, start to finish, posting it, printing it, getting it licensed, and moving on to the next one. While quality is my main concern, I’d be lying if I said I didn’t think of quantity.
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.

However, I’ve realized in recent weeks that there is a silver lining in working on multiple pieces simultaneously. Each painting gets time to rest, and when I open a project I haven’t touched in a week or two, the deficiencies or problems jump off the screen. That’s good because it reveals areas of the image I need to improve.

Last Friday morning, I opened this goofy gallery of Ring-tail Lemurs for the first time in a few weeks. I laughed out loud at the ridiculousness of the seven faces on the screen and said, “They look so stupid.”

And I meant it in the best possible way.

Would I have had that moment if I hadn’t let the painting rest? I doubt it. My comical critters surprised me. What a gift.
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.

All that’s left is hours of painting to bring them to life.

Cheers,
Patrick

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Back to Bears

I rarely visit the Calgary Zoo to drop off prints and stickers without making time to take pictures, and many of those photos eventually inspire paintings.

Skoki is a resident grizzly bear born in 1987 near Lake Louise.

Over several years, while he was young, Bear #16, as he was initially known, learned to associate people with an easy meal, an education he received from careless campers and tourists. When he tried to be a regular bear, eating grass and foraging for natural food, photo seekers harassed and pushed him to the point of bluff charges. Eventually, he lost his fear of people and hung around the Lake Louise townsite.

He had become a spoiled bear. Several relocation attempts failed, which is hardly a surprise for anyone who lives here. Relocation is often a last-ditch effort to avoid euthanizing a problem bear.

That closeup bear photo people are so desperate to take on the highway shoulder might go viral and deliver social media likes and shares, but it often ends badly for the bear. Nobody shares that photo on Facebook or Instagram.

It’s ironic that people object to animals in captivity, but we can’t seem to get it through our heads to respect them in the wild, allowing them space to live in their natural habitats.
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.

Whenever I find Skoki active and playful, I take time for photos. Despite his relocation from the wild into captivity, he has been a wonderful ambassador bear, and his story helps to educate people about the wild world on our doorstep.

Skoki inspired my recent Spa Day piece, though I used several bears for the reference. One day, I found him sitting in one of his ponds, playfully eating what looked like a lettuce leaf. I noticed the ripples and reflections and wondered how I’d paint him. I didn’t get the reference I wanted that day, but the idea stayed with me.
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.

He sat there a long while, and I took so many photos of him looking this way and that, laying his head down on the log, sniffing the air, pawing left and right, that I came home with dozens of suitable reference photos. From this experience, I came up with the idea of painting several bears sitting beside each other at a log, as if they were indeed meeting up for an afternoon happy hour in the forest.
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 won’t make it an actual bar with drinks or food in front of them. I’ve no desire to paint a bear variation of Dogs Playing Poker. Even though my paintings aren’t true to life, and I paint whimsical expressions, I don’t want to start creating wildlife in human settings. There are exceptions, of course, where I’ve put a Santa hat on a bear, and I will paint some more Christmas-themed images like that strictly for commercial and licensing opportunities.
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.

So, instead of one log bear painting in progress, I’ve got two. And all these sketches and bear paintings will contribute to the bear book.

If my skills match my vision for the  five bears piece, it will be one of the images I’ll include for my next round of puzzles later this year.

I’m working on more paintings right now than I ever have at one time, so next week, I’ll have another painting-in-progress to write about and some new  images to share.

Cheers,
Patrick

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A Merry Meerkat

I’ve taken hundreds of meerkat photos at the Calgary Zoo over the years. Their antics never fail to amuse me, and because of their natural inclination to stand upright and still, staring at anything that catches their eye, they often appear to be posing for me.

The problem with taking photos of these critters is that every time I go, I try for a shot that’s just a little bit better than any I’ve taken before.

I recently realized that when a photo opportunity is rare, and I can only get three or four decent ones, I’ll make them work. I’ve painted many of my whimsical wildlife pieces with limited reference, even some of the most popular ones, like the Otter and Smiling Tiger.

But I know that whenever I go to the zoo, I’ll have time and opportunity to take more meerkat shots, so I never have to commit. The ones I have may be good, but maybe the next ones will be better. This means the painting never happens because I’m still waiting for the perfect reference, even though I know there’s no such thing.

The other false belief I’m working to shed is that once I have painted an animal, I must move on to a new one. It often feels like I’m only allowed one shot at it, so I had better make it count. Why bears get a free pass on this fuzzy logic is beyond me.
Earlier this year, I painted my Bugle Boy piece. It’s proven to be a popular painting and has become one of my favourites. But I almost didn’t paint another bull elk because I painted one several years ago, even though I never liked it.

My bull moose painting has long been retired from print. It was popular in its day, and I liked it then, but I’ve been reluctant to paint another one. However, after the positive elk experience, I have gathered new reference to take another crack at a moose. I think I can do a better job of it now.
When it came to meerkats, I’ve long had the idea to paint a whole troop of them, so painting a solitary meerkat wasn’t on the radar, or I’d do the occasional sketch painting, but never a finished production piece. But just like the three giraffes I painted for my Long Neck Buds piece, each of them a portrait on their own, each solitary meerkat might become part of that eventual group painting.

Or it’s just the first meerkat I’ll paint, of who knows how many more down the road.

Cheers,
Patrick

 

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A Trio of New Prints

It’s always exciting to get new prints.

My Wacom Cintiq 24HD display is colour-calibrated, and I’ve been working with Art Ink Print, my printer in Victoria, for several years, so I no longer need to proof new images. Through trial and error and long experience, I know how to format and tweak my images ahead of time. When they arrive, I’m always impressed.

These three new pieces, Blizzard Bear, Long Neck Buds and Winter Tiger, were no exception.
While I enjoy working on all my paintings and feel some connection to each, I have my favourites, which often sneak up on me. Some are for sentimental reasons, like my first Grizzly Bear, as that painting led me to the work I enjoy most and launched a whole new phase of my art career.

Others, like my Coyote, Ostrich and almost every painting of Berkley the bear, are because of the personal stories that go with them. And some grow on me over time, paintings I like fine when I create them, but each time I see them in a new print order, I realize how much I’ve grown to love them. That was the case with my first Polar Bear painting, so much so that I printed an 18” X24” canvas of it for myself, and it hangs over my desk.
While opening these new prints earlier this week, it was clear that the Winter Tiger is an instant member of that group. I love this painting. I showed the print to Shonna and said, “Damn, I’m getting good.”

Yes, that sounds incredibly arrogant, but it really means that I worked hard on that one to achieve more detail in the fur and snow, which shows in the print. Like most artists, I’m hypercritical of my work, so when I love a print, that’s saying something. I suspect that one might end up as a big canvas print in my office, too. I’m definitely printing it on canvas for the Banff Christmas Markets.

To think, I almost didn’t paint another tiger because my Smiling Tiger is already one of my Top 2 bestsellers. The Otter is the other one. Ironically, neither of those is among my favourites, proving that I can only create the art and put it out into the world. Others decide if any become popular.
Yesterday afternoon, I delivered two custom canvas prints to a client in Calgary, then an order of vinyl stickers and prints to the Calgary Zoo. As it was the end of the day, I made the delivery but didn’t have time to take new photos. These new prints were in that zoo order, along with a restock of several others.
They’re now available in my online store. And if you’re looking for more than a couple, it’s FREE SHIPPING in Canada on orders over $80. There is no website/signature stamp on the actual print and I personally sign each one.

Cheers,
Patrick