Painting the wet look in this one was challenging because I had to decide where to draw the line. I could have added more rain in the background and foreground, but I’d risk it looking too busy. The same could be said for the water droplets I painted on the feathers. More definition might equal more distraction.
Had I made the eagle wetter, it would mean flattening the feathers, making a dome out of the crown of its head. More accurate, perhaps, but I like painting fur and feathers, so I kept the wet look but still showed the definition. Maybe it had just given its head a shake.
Ultimately, I chose to go with what I do best: the detail in the face, expression and personality. Too much time spent on painting the forest might mean nobody sees the tree. A painting is not defined only by what you include but also what you choose to leave out.
I already have a bald eagle painting that’s been popular for many years in both prints and licensing. It often feels that if I paint more than one of an animal, the second might not be as good as the first, or at least as well received.
That’s foolish, of course.
People like both of my Snow Leopard and Snow Queen paintings. I’ve watched snow leopard fans choose between them at markets, and neither is the consistent winner. I’ve also painted more bears than any other animal, and there’s no chance I’ll stop anytime soon. I’ve also heard no complaints.
I’ve seen plenty of eagles on several trips to Vancouver Island and on visits to the Alberta Birds of Prey Centre in Coaldale. A few years ago, a subscriber (Hi, Eileen!) sent me a link to a wildlife cam near her home in Big Bear Valley, California. Ever since then, right around this time, I enjoy checking in on Jackie and Shadow as they try again for another viable clutch of eggs. Nothing so far, but fingers crossed.
Though we romanticize eagles, imagining them soaring high in the sky for the sheer joy of flying, they’re experts at energy conservation and efficiency. Flying takes a lot of effort, and unless it’s for food or mating, an eagle is most content sitting in a tree all day. That’s also why some scavenge and eat carrion when available rather than hunt for fresh prey.
They have exercise runways at the Birds of Prey Centre, and the flight training is fun to watch. Though they try to release most rescued birds back into the wild, it’s not always an option and some become residents. The staff weigh the birds to keep them hungry enough that food is still a motivator. When it’s time for exercise, food rewards entice the birds to fly back and forth on the runways.
It doesn’t take many trips for the eagles and hawks to get tired, and bald eagles and other raptors will overheat if they fly a lot. They cool off by holding their wings open and panting like dogs. After training sessions, especially on warm days, the eagles return to the open aviary for a shower. Placed on a perch, the staff hose them down, and the eagles obviously enjoy it.
I’ve taken several wet eagle photos on multiple visits, and had the idea for this painting a few years ago. My recent trip down there this summer reminded me to paint this raptor in the rain.
Cheers,
Patrick
“How long does it take you to paint one of these?”
The spark for this painting was reference photos I took at the 
I did some drawings shortly after that and returned to them whenever I had the time. While Skoki was the inspiration, I used several bears in my photo archive as reference for the bodies and faces. If nothing else, I figured they would be good sketches for the book I’ve been talking about for years, but to my eternal shame, never deliver.
Once I had several sketches, I pieced them together, trying to find a composition I liked. The five grizzly bear buddies soon became five members of a family. It reminded me of a grizzly bear version of a Sears family portrait photo shoot. Refining the shapes so they fit together, and reimagining the expressions meant losing a lot of the sketch detail I had already drawn, but that’s just part of the process.
Many paintings begin as one idea but take on their own life while I work. I have no idea how many hours I’ve put into this piece, but it’s more than any painting before.
Rather than work in colour from the start, as with other paintings, I started this one in greyscale because I wanted to play with the values and experiment with the scene. Once I had a good starting point, I painted colour in the background and foreground, leaving the grizzlies for last.
Initially, the berries in the foreground were bright red. But when I showed this work-in-progress image to my buddy, Derek, at Electric Grizzly Tattoo, he suggested they might be a distraction from the bears. It was a helpful critique. So, I toned down the berries and made them a deeper burgundy and blue.
As brown bears come in many shades, from dark brown to red to blonde, I had initially planned to have a more noticeable colour difference between the five. But it looked weird, and I didn’t like it, so I erred on the side of more subtle variations in fur colour.
One of the nice things about working digitally is that at the end of each painting session, I can look back at the image when I opened the file and compare it to progress at the end of a session. It’s often a big difference, and that’s satisfying. However, when a painting nears completion, two hours of work may be barely noticeable before and after. That’s usually how I know it’s time to call it done.
Deciding whether I like a piece or not takes time, but I’m pretty happy with how this turned out. I liked my 
Because of the current uncertain economy, I’m not yet committing to doing puzzles again right away. But when I do, I think this grizzly family is worthy of consideration.
Last week was a challenge.
I never know which paintings will become popular and which ones won’t resonate with people. Or sometimes people will like an image, just not as a print to hang on their wall. The only way to find out is to create the painting, release it, and see what happens. When I retire an image in print, it means it will no longer be available on my site or at markets.
Sometimes, a print will become popular for a particular venue, like the 
My Sasquatch painting is a popular licensed image for Pacific Music & Art, as they have customers all over the Pacific Northwest, BC, and Alaska. 
Even when I no longer sell a print, my licensing clients may still offer the image on their products, and my wholesale customers may still order prints from me to sell to their customers. I just have to require the same minimum orders from them that my printer requires from me.
My next-door neighbours, 
Cindy volunteered with the local SPCA shelter here. And though they had fostered another dog that eventually went to live with her parents in Calgary, they hadn’t found the right one for them until they met Timber.
He printed and framed it and sent a photo of it hanging on their wall.
I sent the finished image, and they were thrilled, which made me doubly happy. Because they already had a shadowbox framed 18X24 canvas of my Wolf painting, they wanted Timber’s to match.
I brought it to Derek’s house a couple of days later, and he matched the colour, finely sprayed the small area a few times, and saved the canvas. You can’t tell there was ever a problem, and you can still see my underlying brush strokes. I held the canvas while he painted with the airbrush, so we staged the above photo after the fact, knowing I’d want to write about it.
Of course, the best part of any 
Because I haven’t released a new painting in a while, I did not want to publish yet another post promising something new down the road. So, here’s a new piece: a weary-looking grizzly bear in the snow. I’m calling it Bedtime.
With a lot to do and feeling like I was way behind, a cabin trip seemed like a low priority. But it’s an inexpensive getaway, a relatively short drive, and I needed a break.
Not the most exciting critter encounters, but I got some good squirrel pics. This amusing little chatterbox might very well inspire a painting.
I took photos of wind-broken tree stumps where I might place an owl or eagle. A natural doorway created by curved and fallen branches has potential. You never know what might spark a new piece.
Though we had visited with them earlier, the owners texted us Sunday evening that the Atlas comet was barely visible over the pasture. It had been brighter and more evident days earlier, but this was the last chance to see it. We walked out in the dark, not wanting to use flashlights that might ruin our night vision and found the faint anomaly among the sea of stars. Darrel took this shot on his newer phone. I couldn’t get a good capture with mine. You can just see the comet tail on the left.
We had nice fall weather for most of our time there, but it got cold and windy Sunday night and Monday. A snowstorm hit Calgary and Canmore, and given the road reports and Shonna’s texts, I was thrilled I didn’t have to drive back until Tuesday.
My order from Pacific Music & Art was waiting for me when I got home, and it contained 
On the one hand, it shows that this side of my business continues to grow. As it’s the work I enjoy most and has the best chance of ensuring my financial future, I’m grateful. But it’s a significant investment of time and money that comes with no small amount of anxiety.
While I had lunch with my zookeeper friend, Serena, a couple of other people arrived. Coincidentally, they were also longtime friends of the park. Rather than the usual bear education presentation we’d seen several times, Serena gave the three of us a behind-the-scenes personal tour and visit with the bears.
Cold, dark, and windy, the rain at least let up for a few hours. While the pictures I got weren’t impressive photographs on their own, some of these shots will be amazing for reference. I’ve written before about how sunny days aren’t great because they can wash out detail in the highlights and shadows, but an overcast day provided some very exciting photos of bear fur and features.
If that weren’t enough, Serena has been hand-raising an orphaned raccoon since he was tiny. Shonna I got to see him earlier this summer, but on this day, he was getting his first look at a much bigger world, as he was let loose for a bit to run and play in a large enclosure. If you’ve ever seen a cat or dog with the zoomies, imagine that with a raccoon. He was having a very good time.
After the park, I took my parents out to dinner in Red Deer and spent the night at their place for a nice, albeit short, visit.
Several years ago, a local photographer told me about
Their primary motivation is food, so they’re usually en route to one of the small patches of grass and vegetation among the rocks, where they’ll stuff their faces before running back to their stash. It’s fun to watch.
It can get cold up there at 2200m (7200 ft), and I always pack extra layers, but it was a pleasant fall morning, and I only needed a light jacket. On a few visits, there’ve been ten or 12 other people, often photographers with much bigger lenses than my 70-300mm, doing the same thing. But on this visit, I spent an hour and a half crawling over the rocks and snapping pics with the whole place to myself. Nobody else stopped.
On each drive up to Rock Glacier, I usually see black bears or grizzlies, but none this time. They’re likely still low in the valleys, eating as much as possible before winter. But they can show up anywhere around here, and on these excursions, I’ve always got bear spray on my hip. Aside from the above pic of a line of bighorn sheep walking the top of the ridge, I only saw the wildlife I came for.
Though I have kept dozens of pika photos over the years, I’ve always felt I hadn’t quite got the one I wanted, that perfect photo to paint from. I finally got one on this trip, but I haven’t shared it in this post. It’ll just have to be a surprise.
But I’ve also been working on the group of bears I’ve been chipping away at for some time now. The original plan for this piece was five adult bears sitting at a log in the woods, like a group of friends hanging out and chatting. I drew six of them separately to give myself options.
However, when I dropped and dragged them together into one image, the digital canvas was very long. A long horizontal canvas has appeal for a canvas or metal print. However, from a commercial perspective, it would limit what I could offer for licensing and paper prints.
Once I was pleased with the group layout, I dropped the layer’s opacity and traced over the shapes and basic features. I did this several times, refining with each pass.
Then, I got to work on the shading, detail, expressions, and character. I do that right up until the end of every painting, as personality is the most essential part and is where I have the most fun. And with this painting, I’ve got five faces to discover instead of one.
This piece seems like a family posing for a Sears portrait or the opening of a sitcom like Family Ties or Growing Pains. I’m going to call it ‘The Grizzlies.’