The few oil paintings I have done are really more “scrapings” than they are paintings (so I guess I’m in good company too!)

Though I must admit, I am willing to leave the good company for acrylic if it means I can paint over something immediately without all the scraping (and believe me, there was a lot of it).

“he’s supposed to be pausing in midstride up the slope, but it just ain’t working.

Nice painting.

…but (and forgive my asking) why is he headed uphill (toward the summit?) in the dead of winter?

Most elk that I know (and I have made acquaintance with quite a few over the years) head down-hill (toward the valleys) when the snow flies.

Tell the truth: is it because he is being chased by an artist with a camera?

What I do have is a venerable full-length mirror propped on my old easel and I use it constantly to check the drawing and well, just about every element. Plus making sure when I designed the studio that I could get at least 15 feet back from the painting.

There was a story that a sitter told about having her portrait done by Sargent. He would stand waaay back from the canvas and look back and forth between it and his subject. Then he would quickly stride forward, lay down a couple of strokes, turn and walk away again. Over and over and over and over and……

Wiping out hurts. Especially when it’s the part you think you really nailed. It’s like you have to kill the thing you love.

Susan: absolutely - scale really changes the difficulty and challenge of a piece. Sometimes a smaller work (less than, say, 14×18) allows me to get away with more suggestion (via loose brushwork, or color) than a larger piece. And while this painting is only 24×18, the elk in it is obviously more like 18″ high than 8″. It requires a lot of walking away from the piece to get it all in. That…or take photos of it - somehow scaling a piece down to the LCD on the back of my camera makes flaws really jump out at me.

Wiping out finished areas still hurts. Or maybe I’m just a wimp.

I think it’s span of vision. It’s easy to see “all” of an animal that is 8″ long, but takes an adjustment, or has for me at least, to see all of one that is 18″ long. Have you found that to be true, Julie? Anyone else?

You’ve also demonstrated how necessary it is to be willing to make corrections at any point in a painting, even when one thinks it’s done. It’s so easy to make mental excuses and try to pretend that it’s all really ok. I used to do that and had to get over it to really move my work forward. Wiping out finished areas ended up not be an painful as I thought it would be. Mostly.

Doug, thanks for the kind note. Actually, moving the one hind leg forward meant a number of minor corrections to BOTH hind legs in order to make the musculoskeletal structure ‘correct’ for that position. It really would have been enormously helpful to have a photo of an elk in that exact pose and viewing angle…but I didn’t. As Bob Kuhn said, there’s no such thing as too much reference material. I had 3-4 different elk photos and several different landscape photos to put this painting together. A freakin lotta WORK.

Great Job! Having that knowledge of anatomy really helps(as I have mentioned
before) you see where things are off and to make the necessary corrections.
Again great job!!

Still doing it, and trying to push values, too!