Julie T. Chapman - ArtBlog

It’s time once again for a highly irregular look into another aspect of the art world, brought to you from the skewed perspective of yours truly. Today’s topic:

How to Paint Wildlife Cheap’n’Easy

1. Go to any craft store and buy some cheapie canvas panels, preferably mounted on non-archival cardboard.
2. Buy some student quality paints and brushes (no sense paying more! no one can tell the difference anyway!)
3. Now we come to the subject matter part! you have several options here:
   1. You could actually go out and find some wildlife and take photos of it, but WOW this involves a lot of time and trouble. Geez, you have to know a whole passel of stuff, like where to find wildlife, and how to operate a camera, and you have to be in shape to hike around for the animals, plus you’d have to have a decent telephoto lens, unless you just want to go to Yellowstone and walk up to a reclining bison (they’re no different than cows, right? no danger here!) with your little point’n’shoot and get some photos…obviously, this is the most troublesome and expensive option so you should probably skip it.
   2. You can buy some cull slides from a wildlife photographer … but this does cost money, and we want to do this for cheap, eh!
   3. You can get some images off the internet - maybe some vacation photos someone posted on Flickr or Photobucket (heck, it’s on the web, no worries about copyright!)
   4. Or…you could just copy an existing artist’s painting. This cuts straight to the chase, now doesn’t it!
4. Ooohh, now for the hard part - how do we get that image you’ve found onto your canvas?? You sure don’t want to spend the next, oh, 5 - 10 years learning how to draw, now do you? Hey, no worries - we did say “easy”! You’ll just need to make one tiny little additional investment in a projector - for example, the aptly named “KopyKake”, which advertises “no more frustration of freehand drawing.” Wow! ANYONE can draw now! Never mind those elitist snob artists who insist that other artists “really should learn how to draw before they paint”. Fortunately, these projectors don’t cost much at all compared to the TIME you’ll save! Oh, you might have a few niggling worries, such as the distortions introduced by camera lenses, or whether you can actually see all the legs in that horse photo properly…but if you can’t tell the difference, no one else can either! so get going and project that image onto your canvas! man, this is easy. Those big-name artists must be living the life of Riley doing this!
5. Finally, the fun part: slopping paint around on the canvas. Oh boy! colors galore! you might have heard something somewhere about lightfastness, but nowadays everything is so advanced that can’t really be a worry, can it? They wouldn’t sell paints that weren’t lightfast, I’m sure!
   Now, applying the paint in the right way and in the right colors and values might take a LITTLE practice….but thank goodness you have that projected image to guide you! just mix up colors that look exactly like the image and put them exactly where your projection shows you! Photos are totally accurate representations of the real world, right? so your painting will be too!

WOW! now isn’t this fun?? After just a couple of these you ought to be able to charge several grand for each one! time to call up some galleries!!