Poco Mountain Girl

Here’s that new piece of art I mentioned the other day.  Pronghorn are not common up here in the Rockies (at least, I’ve never seen them here), but whenever we take a road trip to Santa Fe, we always spot a herd or two in the desert.  They are striking with their tan, white, and black color patterns, and look more like they belong on an African plain.

I worked this piece as I did the buffalo I painted not long ago, but in a softer, more realistic style. Like the buffalo, it is painted on a slice of beetle kill pine, although this one is a much thinner slab, about a half-inch. I washed it with an oil ground of blue, letting through all the glory of the beetle markings, and painted the pronghorn over it once the ground dried.

I really like the visual interplay of the pronghorn and wood, and the way they merge together.  When working on beetle kill, I just have to let the wood paint itself, since I’m not exactly sure which parts will take the oil wash and which will repel it.  Here you can see that the outer arc of the wood really soaked up a deep saturation of color, while the inner part of the semi-circle only took it lightly, even though I washed the tint evenly across the piece.  The wood is much more dense in the center–the same thing happened with the buffalo painting, to a lesser degree.

I have one more large semi-circle of beetle kill, and I’m working a third animal of the American West on it.  This one is being ornery and putting up a good fight, but in the end, I’ll wrassle it down and hog tie it, then set it free to gallop across the beetle kill prairie.

The pronghorn and buffalo are now available in in my shop.

This entry was posted on Monday, November 9th, 2015 at 4:48 am and is filed under Arty, etsy shop, Making Stuff. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.