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
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.
