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HOULY1970 — On The Run - Red Fox
Published: 2007-04-03 14:22:33 +0000 UTC; Views: 974; Favourites: 24; Downloads: 8
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20" x 16" Oil on stretched CanvasRelated content
Comments: 54
Thanks Justin. I've had a few comments from people that have liked it a lot which is weird since it's not really one of my favorite paintings. It didn't really turn out how I envisioned that it would. Which is still okay I guess.
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Wow! I love the action displayed in this picture. The little mouth panting and the paw up just make it look like a photograph. Beautiful! Absolutely fabulous!
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Thank you. I'm glad that you like it.
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Wow! Saw the little thumbnail pic
and thought it was a photo!
Excellent job then, eh?
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Thanks Cindy. I'm glad that you liked it.
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He's moving! He's bounding, prancing through the snow that's so thick and wet I shivered looking at this painting. You managed to imply so much with so little, the level of detail is nothing like your graphite works but the realism is strong here. Beautiful painting, Houly, I'm seriously impressed. Very glad I roamed today to see this!
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Thanks Robert. I try to loosen up more when I can. It's a constant struggle. It's nice to hear that it gave you the feeling of a true winter scene.
Thanks for the great comment.
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In all of your nature scenes, however detailed or loose, the subject and ground are united and the weather so real I can feel and taste it. You always take me right out into the wilderness, at most it's just outside the window of the frame. I have no idea of half the tricks you use to achieve that, but some of it is the wet thickness of the snow patches in this one. Their exact tint too -- they look like that thick wet snow you get with very large slow flakes that once accumulated, might melt slightly and slump like whipped cream peaks -- the kind of snow that isn't a super cold dry day but a wet not all that cold winter day, where slush gets into your boots but it's not so bad if your feet are dry. I think you know the weather I mean, down to your bones, and in different winter scenes I could almost tell you what the temperature and humidity is. It's always true, in a very deep sense. You might have made it up but it's so based on reality that it's quite true -- the foxes and lynxes and eagles are all out there and the world still has such places and such creatures.
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I couldn't answer that if I tried Robert, since I'm not sure how I get things to look as they do in the first place. I just paint until it feels right. I suppose that instictively I know that in my lynx drawing that I was going for a hard crusty snow with a bit of dry powdery snow on top, and for a wetter thicker look for the fox painting. Like they say ... paint what you know .... but painting only that wouldn't be fun for too long, so sometimes I need to push further. Once I finish up the few that I have left to work on, I'm going to do some underwater paintings.
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That makes sense to me. You see all of these different types of winter weather, remember them and it comes back by eye rather than by categorization. You might have to speak Inuit to describe them effectively, I needed whole sentences to describe my impressions.
I'd love to see your underwater paintings. I've done a couple of them and reached a point where I like mine, but still haven't gone as far with my reef scenes as I want to. I might try one in oils sometime later this year. Or in watercolor.
Once I did the color chart for my Artist colors, I got stunned by how rich they are compared to the Cotman colors. I don't have to work as hard to get them to full saturation as I did with Cotmans, another reason I eventually passed up even the Sketchers Box in favor of tube Winsor Newtons. A lot of watercolor paintings come out very light, including some of mine, so I'm working at overcoming that to give better value contrasts and more realism.
It's odd, but your winter scenes make me eventually want to do a gray, rainy day justice sometime. I might succeed at it.
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Yeah your reef drawings are awsome. Myself I'll be using a more muted palette. I know you're more suited for painting the rainbow hued fish and magical colours of reefs, but I an eart tone paletted guy. Everyone has their specialties huh ?
Here's two links to underwater artists that have inspired me.
Ed French > [link]
and
Stanley Meltzoff > [link]
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Oh, definitely! After seeing Stanley Meltzoff's site, I was thrilled and can see the sort of thing you're doing with underwater scenes. We all have our specialties, and mine has been a longing to do the crystal aqua water and naturally high key bright animals for all my life. And, once I get good enough at those, to research extinct reef life and do my own versions of some of the beautiful exhibits at Chicago's Field Museum. Some of the backdrop paintings for the dioramas of pre-Mesozoic sea life thrilled me, trilobites and sea lilies, often in tropical colors very similar to today's fish and corals. I've done one in Graphitints that came out neat and spooky, but I feel as if I have a long way to go with exactly how to compose those scenes.
I might try to do some where the viewer's looking out through an underwater cave or arched rocks with some sessile animals very close in true colors and of course everything greening and bluing as it moves farther from the foreground. I have an idea for one and it's not quite jelled. I had the idea for the round Reef piece I did before, for years before I did it. Part of what hampers me is that while I did get a field guide to seashore life, I have to look up every creature in it to make sure they were all from about the same latitude in the same oceans and parts of the world. I'd hate to do something that realistic and get a comment from an experienced diver or marine biologist telling me what I did was a good drawing of someone's salt water aquarium.
I should do some more Graphitints pieces again, both dry and wet. I love how they turn out either way, once wet, they're brighter but still not as bright as pure watercolors.
Meltzoff worked loose sometimes, but I could feel the cold heavy currents and see the motion in all of his underwater pieces. The one I loved best in Ed French's paintings was "Storm" with the leaping marlin -- that was incredible. I love seascapes too and yet do not have big water anywhere near me to drag my painting stuff out to a rocky beach and spend all day sketching and oil and watercolor sketching.
It won't be next year, but maybe when Boy is three or four we might get out on some family vacations to places with big water. And down to Louisiana again. I may have to actually go back if I ever want to do my Swamp Painting... but I can do herons here, there are a lot of blue herons in the area around Lawrence and I saw one while I was out last time.
I've got a driving urge to do some subjects from life, and don't know if I can do them well until I've been out to see them in reality. But I might poke at them anyway from photos and documentaries so that when I do get to go, I've got the practice I need to capture the scene accurately.
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Yeah You definately have a knack for the vivid reef scenes Robert. Maybe I'll give them a try at some point, but for now my duller earthy muted pallette will suit me well for murky clouded depths and hazy blue waters suited for sharks coming out of the darkness and swordfish and Marlin with their violent thrashing energy and huge groupers hanging just above the ocean bottom like underwater rhinos or elephants.
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I can't wait to see it. That sounds so fascinating that you're tempting me away from my brilliant reef palette to think of deep brown waters and strange behemoths.
My friend Lisa gave me some reference photos she took of herself and a friend. One of them she's sitting in shallow sandy-muddy water in a bathing suit, with her long hair flowing, and her pose and expression made me think of a mermaid. Her legs are partly obscured by the brown silt and in the foreground the water's very transparent, showing the bottom, one hand is slightly distorted going through the water and pressed into the bottom partly obscured. Out where the ripples on the lake begin, the ripples start reflecting the blue sky, and the farther from her I look into the background the bluer it is, with this neat intermittent blue-brown rippling gradient in between, not as a gradient but with ever decreasing brown ripples where you see through the water to the brown or see the reflection on the surface. I'm fascinated with that one and thinking of doing it as a mermaid painting, maybe in oils or acrylics. It's vertical but I would want to extend it off to the right to show more shoreline and where her tail curves off, whether or not her flukes breached is something I won't know till I sketch it.
I also love the hazy blue deep waters thing. I've seen so many undersea documentaries that they all capture my imagination, and in most of the shark shots, the shark dominates the composition. There's the shark and maybe something else, either some prey fish or the diver or just more sharks. Groupers are fun. I love that metaphor, underwater rhinos or elephants.
LOL your tagline! I've been doing that too, and I think it's improving ~alilone 's portrait. I know her face sketch came out perfect after all that mental practice, so I should relax and let that happen at its pace.
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Tempting isn't it ? Sort of like the great unknown. facinating yet at the same time a bit of primal fear comes through since it isn't man's element and he is no longer at the top of the food chain in those depths. Where the creatures are strange and unusual much like an alien world.
Sounds like your mermaid idea would work great with the photo that you described.
Haha I always paint my paintings in my head many times before I actually lay paint to canvas.
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It paid off this time, visualizing it that many times before I sketched it. The most difficult sketch of the series is done. I had to integrate three photo references and guesstimate relative sizes for the bird and the flowers in relation to the lady, though I did have one reference in my Favourites that has a man with several lorikeets sitting on him. The thing is, I didn't see any reference of him standing next to ~alilone so that I'd have an idea of how large the flowers are in relation to her.
I made it a little larger than a parakeet and remembered the sizes of cockatoos I've seen, since I saw some photos with both lorikeets and sulphur crested cockatoos. Lorikeets are smaller but not down at parakeet size, more lovebird size. She described the flowers as about two inches wide, so I scaled them to her eye width and I think they're plausible.
I had a lot of trouble with the composition too, trying to decide exactly where to place each of the three elements. Tonight after I got the flowers and bird in, I looked up and the rest fell into place -- another clump of flowers dangling in the upper right as if the tree or tall shrub they grow on has two large branches, one higher than the other. I think she'll like it. I'm going to tie the greens together with a pale green behind her as if they're posing in front of a painted pale green wall, so that the portrait pops out and looks warmer by contrast.
Something else about it that I didn't realize about the colour till I got the sketch done. I am so relieved! The other two pieces I'm doing for her are easier to sketch, they each have only one reference and I can fool around with it a bit -- will have to for Grandmama since the camera was at a bit of an angle and the horizon's tilted.
After that, oh this summer I'm going to indulge in painting in both oils and acrylics. Depending on finances I might also pick up a set of Winsor & Newton Artisan Oils, their water-mixable oils. It'd solve the problem of flammable, scented thinners in my room and make ventilation much less of a problem, they say those will also mix with traditional oils. Though they also put out special water-mixable linseed oil too.
I considered getting damar varnish, but, I realized that's jumping the gun. I will not actually need the varnish until a painting has cured, so I don't need to buy that right off the bat this time.
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Yeah it happens sometimes as you're going along that all the ellements just fall into place.
Good for you Robert. I know it's been wracking your brain trying to figure out how to finish that piece.
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Purr thanks! Oh yeah I was wracking my brain for months on it. I really got going on it around February, but did not actually set pencil to paper because I hadn't gotten it right in my head. I couldn't just sketch the reference photo because I had to put those other elements in -- if I placed the head wrong I'd have no space for the bird.
As it is, when I got the bird in, I decided on a pose that didn't show its tail or feet because it worked better that way. I didn't even think of that till I did it, most of the time I was trying to find poses that showed every part of the bird in detail. The best expression was on the one peeking around something though!
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great fox snowy and fresh. captured it very well.
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Thanks Kate. I'm glad you like it.
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Beautiful. Reminds me of my homeland, where such things can be witnessed if you're patient enough. *sigh* 
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Sounds like Slovakia might still have plenty of wilderness to spare Jana.
I see them here in Canada regularly along with plenty of other wildlife. It's too bad that you don't where you moved to in the States.
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It does, though I'm sure Canada has more of it.
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Hawks and coyotes make wonderful subjects.
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I *really* love the colors in this one sugar. I'm not sure why, but the stark background with this vibrant fox bolting across it just makes me incredibly happy.
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Everytime you post something I see improvement. You keep getting better and better. You should be proud of this one!
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