ON THE ROAD AGAIN

Sorry I haven't posted recently. We are on a road trip to Florida to do some photography, met with clients and a gallery, and spend a little time with friends out on their boat. I'm SO grateful to the retired couple who stays at our house and takes care of all animals which allows us to do some traveling.

I will post photos from the trip as soon as I can!

BISON STARTED

I like a clean area to work my fur/hair technique. I use to masque out with watercolor masque, but it tended to create hard edges. So now I transfer my drawing to the painting surface (just the outlines of the animals) and go back and paint them in with my purplish tinted gesso.

GRASSES

I am now laying in the grasses by "scrumbling". That is, to take an old brush, and scrunch and push it up and down and sometimes around to create the underlying texture of the grass. This seems to work best in sort of a semi dry brush technique. If the paint is to thin (to much water) if creates softer edges which don't look as much like grass.

The second photo is of the grass area underpainting now done.

Lying in the background

I generally paint sitting down since I am a detailed artist. However, for a large painting like this, lying in the background area I stand up. Here I'm doing the far off tree line.

DRAWINGS

First I did a drawing about 8 x 10ish to present to the collector.  Once approved I then created a grid on the drawing so that I could redraw larger to scale on a piece of 30 x 40" tracing paper.

Other photo

Here is the photo at Wolf Park that for some reason didn't post.

NEW BISON PAINTING

I have a big commission from a local judge of a herd of bison.  I'm going to show you this painting as I work on it from beginning to end.  These first two photos are me in the field researching bison.  This is ongoing - I have photos in my files that I took 25 years ago.  I'm always out sketching, photographing and studying nature and then when I decide to do a painting I go back into my files and sketchbooks to find materials to use as reference in my paintings.

The first photo was taken during one of my workshops at Wolf Park - www.wolfpark.org.  This wonderful place is the only research facility that has socialized wolves.  As part of the enrichment of the wolves the biologist periodically put them out with a healthy herd of bison.  Because the wolves are well feed, and the bison are strong, there is no killing that goes on, but just interesting interactions between the two species.  I'm in the white shirt and you can see in this photo all I'm doing is watching and studying.

I have had lots of research on bison through the years - Yellowstone, Bison National Refuge etc.  But I am lucky in that I have three sources of bison close to me.  One is a private ranch north of our town, then we also have the Tall Grass Prairie Preserve which is owned by the Nature Conservancy about 20 minutes from us.  This is stocked with bison from the private ranch mentioned earlier. 

 Then we also have Woolaroc - www.Woolaroc.com - which is a wonderful museum and wildlife refuge 20 minutes away.  James and I got special permission to go out with one of the ranch hands to photograph longhorns one day - and as you can see and added bonus were some of the bison.

POSSIBLE WORKSHOP

I am toying with the idea of putting together a combination photos shoot and workshop September 24-26 in Minnesota. The shoot will be at MINNESOTA WILDLIFE CONNECTION which is where James took this wonderful photo of a red fox. At this stage I am trying to gage level of interest. If you think this is something you might be interested in please email me at mcguireandhines@aol.com and let me know1

COWGIRL UP!!

This is a photo that was taken of myself, James and Joshua Rose, editor of WESTERN ART COLLECTOR and AMERICAN ART COLLECTOR magazine in front of my paintings, by the official photographer during the COWGIRL UP!! exhibit at Desert Caballeros Museum in Wickenburg, Az.

Photo credit: Jim Culver www.jimculver.zenfolio.com

SEDONA

James and I visited Sedona on our way home from COWGIRL UP!  The landscape was spectacular as seen in this photo.  Unfortunately it's been 25 years or so since I've been and when I was there it was a really unique artist community with boutique shops, galleries and studios.  Now it is a wall to wall tourist town with lots of tourist trap knick knack and T shirt shops - or else places where people stop you on the street to try to sell you either time shares or jeep safaris.  Not my cup of tea at all.  Although there was one area away from the main downtown that had a few nice shops and galleries.  Yeah, I know - the only thing that doesn't change is change. . . . . . to bad. . . .