Fiddling with drawing

I'm still fiddling with drawing for this painting. The problem to start with was the upper oval was a little wider than I was planning. Then the deer shape drawn relative to the oval was off balanced as the result, while the positions and size of paws were fine because they were relative to the lower oval.
But the position of deer's left eye is correct. So now I can draw/paint everything relative to the eye. Now I might not need to correct the oval any more.

Finishing up this landscape

I'm trying to finish this up over this holiday weekend. It's taking too much, or waiting too long for this to magically turn into a master piece, which was not happening. But I definitely have learned lessons for last 5 months. I guess it's enough now.

Hope I don't have to update this any more as I'm intending.

New Animal Painting

A new deer painting has two oval shapes and one rectangle in it. It' difficult to draw perfect ovals by hand. But they don't have to be perfect anyway.
Those three shapes represent planes of air contains the background objects.

Need a change

I realized I hadn't touched this painting this month. So I did tonight. But I needed a change to get this painting going. Very common trick I came up with was upside down. Then came to understand the key was the dark part of pointing trees, which is holding the big rocky mountain. I need to push more values for those parts to spice up this.

I kind of decided I had to finish this within this month. Memorial Day weekend would be the good time to push this close to the end.

Moses Coulee

Yesterday, I rode my motorcycle to get to La Conner to attend a panel discussion about John Cole and his arts. I arrived 45 min late due to a couple of mistakes/miscalculations I made. So I could see/hear only last 20 min. But it was good enough.

After coming back home, I quickly load up my painting stuff on the motorcycle and took off to get to Quincy where I booked a motel room for the night.  Then this morning I rode to Moses Coulee and painted at the side of a gravel mountain road. It was gorgeous morning to paint the big scene.

Since I spent some time to make a thumb nail sketch, the composition and proportion of the bluffs are about right. I think. The colors of sagebrush is still challenging especially where the clouds high above cast shadow on.

I took more than 100 photos with my new (used) Nikon p520. I would probably make bigger paintings not only for this scene but also from other photos. I had a very good time out there.

Getting tired of this...

Looks like I failed again with the background of this barrel race series. I wanted to make the background more random but ended up painting bleachers. I'll finish this up soon after putting more highlight or color contrast on the main subjects. The rest is auxiliary. This would be the last update.