Category: Sketch Painting

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The Ringleader

Some paintings come together easily. A reference photo may immediately inspire an idea, I’ll sit down and mock up sketches, and it will almost feel like the image creates itself.

This was NOT one of those paintings.

I’ve had more than a few frustrating experiences painting where the work didn’t seem to want to come together. I’ve beaten myself up about it, wrung my hands and thought, “Well, I used to know how to do this; I guess I don’t anymore.”

Eventually, I’ve made it through, and some of those paintings became bestsellers.
This painting has been something entirely different. Even though I had a clear idea of what I wanted it to look like, I couldn’t get it to feel right. It was inspired by a photo I took at the Calgary Zoo, and I even had the name of the piece before I painted the first brushstroke.

I came very close to calling this piece finished a couple of months ago. But I showed it to my artist friend Derek, who kindly told me what I already knew. It wasn’t working. The faces were laid out too uniformly, like a tic-tac-toe grid, and the personality wasn’t there.

So I went back to the beginning, discarding dozens of hours of work to start over again. The difference this time, however, was that I looked at it as one piece containing several characters rather than several characters I created separately and then assembled into one piece.
The first go round, I used a specific reference for each lemur I painted and drew them all individually. Even after I assembled them, I kept going back to the individual references for each, and it wasn’t easy to keep track of it all. I made it far too complicated.

When I started over, I abandoned the individual reference. I focused on the expressions and characters without worrying about making each look like a specific reference because I didn’t need it. Lemurs are lemurs; they don’t look all that different from each other. As long as the central character had the most personality, the others were the supporting cast, even though their details were still necessary.
The key to getting this piece back on track was to stop painting individual trees and just paint the forest. Even though this was a challenging painting, with a lot of redrawing and direction changes, I learned from the frustration. These kinds of lessons always contribute to better work in the future.

On Marc Maron’s WTF podcast this week, director James Mangold talked about lessons he has learned in filmmaking. He said that even though you need to start with a plan, if you hold it too tightly, you don’t leave any room for discovery in the process.

The finished piece still doesn’t quite match my original inspiration and vision. And while there are still the same nine lemurs as before, they’re more dynamic in their placement, different angles, placed higher and lower. There are more tails here and there, and I added hands for the ringleader as the central character.

But when I spend too much time with a painting, I can’t see it with fresh eyes anymore, so I don’t know if it’s any good.

What’s worse is that January and February are tough for me, as they are for many people. We’ve been enduring a period of bitter cold the past couple of weeks, and that always sucks the life out of me. I’ve forced myself to go for a few hikes and bundled-up bike rides to get out of the house and exercise, but it’s been a slog.

It’s also a time of year when I spend a lot of money on my business. From the final 50% booth installment for The Calgary Expo, the deposit for registering for the Banff Christmas Market, my first quarterly tax installment, paying for new promotional items, test prints for new products, plus restocking prints for anticipated spring client orders and Expo, and all the materials that go with that, it’s a part of self-employed stress I never get used to. It’s a maxim as old as time that you must spend money to make money, but nothing is guaranteed, so it’s always uncomfortable.

Finally, with the editorial cartoon side of my work, I must follow the deluge of bad news that breaks daily because he-who-shall-not-be-named continues his insane barrage of verbal and economic attacks on Canada. As much as I’d like to turn off the news to preserve my sanity, I can’t do that and still do my job.

All of this, aside from the 51st-state bullshit, is business as usual for this time of year. But when it piles on, it usually puts me in a pretty dark place.
Under these circumstances, my perception of how any finished piece looks is distorted. I have no idea how I feel about this painting and probably won’t for a while. I feel more relief that it’s finally over than satisfaction with the result.

I’ve done several paintings in my career where I’ve felt indifference for them upon completion but grew to love them over time. Maybe this will be one of those, but I have no way to know. Artists tend to put too much pressure on themselves and make more out of their work than they should, and I am no exception. Ultimately, it’s just a painting of some funny-looking lemurs, and I have spent enough time on it.

“Art is never finished, only abandoned.”

Nobody knows if Leonardo da Vinci really said it, but it’s an oft-repeated quote because of how much it resonates with artists, that there is always room for improvement, and perfection isn’t possible.

With that in mind, I’m moving on and will start a new painting in a day or two.

Cheers,
Patrick

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The Grizzlies

“How long does it take you to paint one of these?”

It’s one of the most common questions I get.

Do I include all the time and travel? Taking, sorting and editing reference photos? How about sketches and roughs? What about the paintings where I took the reference a few years ago but wasn’t inspired by them until much later?

I’ve never completed a painting in one sitting. It’s usually one or two hours at a time. When I’m not painting, I draw editorial cartoons, do my bookkeeping, admin work, format and order products, email clients, and try to have a life, none of which is on a schedule. Sometimes, I start a painting and don’t return to it for a week. Right now, I have at least five paintings in different stages of completion.

So, technically, I have no idea how long it really takes to complete each painting.

But rather than bore a market booth customer with a complicated, existential answer to a simple question, I usually ballpark it and say, “Somewhere around 15 or 20 hours.”

I don’t know if that’s more or less than what they expected.
The spark for this painting was reference photos I took at the Calgary Zoo in June of 2023. I enjoyed watching long-time grizzly resident Skoki straddle a log while resting his arms on another log across it. It reminded me of somebody bellying up to a bar to order a drink.

He sat there for a good long while and I took dozens of photos of him turning this way and that. The painting that first came to mind was four or five grizzlies sitting at the log, like buddies at the bar. I even figured I might call it Grizzly Bar.
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.

I’ll confess I don’t much like painting landscapes or scenery, so I wanted to get that out of the way to get to the part I love most — the bears, of course.
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.

For you digital painters, this was a very big file with a lot of detail. The finished dimensions are  30″X40″ at 300ppi. Near the end of this piece, with seven layers, the working file size was over 1.5GB. Thankfully my computer can handle it, but I still closed and reopened the program every half hour or so to prevent any lag. With a file this big, a crash can happen and losing an hour of work is a real risk.
Deciding whether I like a piece or not takes time, but I’m pretty happy with how this turned out. I liked my Meerkat piece when I finished it, but it took four weeks of it hanging on the grid wall beside me at The Banff Christmas Market before I realized it’s one of my personal favourites.
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.

What do you think? Let me know in the comments.

Cheers,
Patrick

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The Grizzlies – A Work in Progress

With two commissions and several other projects on the go, it was tough to get traction this summer. I’m also spending a lot of time planning for the Banff Christmas markets that begin in November. As it spans four long weekends, I’ll soon need to figure out how much stock to order.

But first, there are two paintings I want to finish, so I’ll have them available for print and puzzles.

This week, the printed 18″ X24″ stretched canvas of a recently completed commission arrived. I’m delighted with how this painting turned out, and most importantly, so is the client. I’ll deliver it the first week of September when the client visits Canmore. After that, I look forward to sharing it with all of you.

The second commission is coming along nicely. 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.

To make all five bears fit, with a bit of personal space between each, I’d need to compose them in a way that would leave a lot of space above and below. But that would make their faces much smaller, and I’d have to paint more foliage and background. Or I could stretch them vertically, but then they’d look far too distorted.

This is where working digitally is a blessing. While experimenting with each bear sketch, pushing and warping features, I soon realized another option for this painting. What if I made it a family of bears with older cubs, looking almost like teenagers?

Now, I know nature doesn’t work like this. The father is long gone by the time the cubs are born, which is good because he’d be a significant threat. As for Mom, she chases the cubs away at two or three years old.

I don’t paint reality.

It didn’t take long to fall for this new composition and abandon the old one. A family meant I could group them closer and have more fun with their expressions. Pushing, pulling and warping each of the sketched bears destroyed the initial sketched detail, but I probably would have had to do that for my original vision as well.

The sketches were just templates, and each contributed to this discovery.
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.’

It reminds me of my great horned owls painting, One in Every Family, which is still a bestseller ten years after I painted it. I had a lot of fun with that painting, and that finished piece didn’t match my initial intent, either. My owls painting won Best in Show at Photoshop World 2014 in Las Vegas, awarding me the camera I still use today to take much of my reference. It’s now a trusted old friend.

There’s still a lot of work to do on this piece. Refining the light and contrast, adding colour to the bears and a lot more detail, but I’ve finally found the spark in this piece. This painting felt like one more thing on the to-do list a couple of weeks ago, but I’m now into it and enjoying the work.

Cheers,
Patrick

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Continuing Education

Since I didn’t start seriously drawing until my mid-twenties and never went to art school, I have often felt that I have spent most of my career playing catch-up.

I’m a workaholic perfectionist, which can be good or bad, depending on your metric. Rarely a day goes by that I don’t work, even for a couple of hours. This is not a complaint, nor should it be interpreted as humble-bragging.

It’s just my wiring.

On self-employment, Seth Godin once wrote, “You would never work for somebody who treats you the way you treat yourself.”

See? It’s not just me.

I heard recently on an art podcast that most people who go to art school don’t end up as artists for a living. The talent and art skills aren’t enough; you have to be driven.

The fact that I started late in the game means I’ve always been hungry, which has contributed to my longevity in this profession that’s synonymous with failure. An unhealthy dose of fear plays a big part as well. Grabbing the brass ring is easy but keeping a white-knuckle grip on it for decades, therein lies the struggle.

When people find out that I didn’t go to art school, they’ll often ask, “oh, so you’re self-taught?”

Self-Taught sounds like I just conjured it out of thin air, a claim that would be incredibly arrogant and false. I prefer the term self-directed.

I’ve learned from plenty of teachers, most of whom don’t even know it. While the internet has its fair share of toxicity and bile, it’s also a treasure trove of knowledge we often take for granted. While at Red Deer College, I remember having to drive down to the University of Calgary library to research a Psychology paper because the information wasn’t available in the college or city library where I lived.

Today that sounds positively archaic.

In books, webinars, podcasts, conference classes and online courses, there’s always a new bit of wisdom or technique waiting to be absorbed.

If you can’t find it, you aren’t looking.

Whether it’s how to make an image better or insight into the business of art, there is no excuse for failing to acquire or improve any skill you might have or desire.

That’s why the thought of retirement seems so foreign to me. I may slow my pace and become more selective of the work I do, but I’ll create art for as long as I’m able; however that looks.

I recently bought an online course on Character Design from Aaron Blaise, a fantastic artist with impressive credentials. Although I learned long ago to never say never, I don’t currently want to be a character designer.

But I’ve always felt that the principles of character design and animation, putting more action, life and dynamics into my cartoons and paintings, that’s where my skills are weakest. I’ve taken a couple of other courses on this theme over the years, but they never seemed to take.

This one, however, is fantastic. Even Shonna has noticed an improvement in my cartoons lately, and I’m only halfway through the course. It’s so good that I intend to watch it again, to reinforce some of the techniques. When finished, I’ll take another of Blaise’s courses.

I plan to talk about this course again, likely an accompanying narrative with a painting video, but for now, I’ll say that it has been time and money well spent.

As I approach my 50th birthday, I still feel like I’m playing catch-up when it comes to my art, even though the only person I should be comparing myself to is the artist I was yesterday. Funny how often I fail to remember that, especially while scrolling through Instagram.

Most of the time, everything I draw, whether cartoon or painting, is designed to be a finished piece. However, this course has got me drawing for practice again, investing in the skills that will allow me to make even better finished pieces later.

This weekend, I spent most of Saturday morning working on a new commission and Sunday morning on editorial cartoons. But in the afternoons, I played with this funny looking Mandrill. It’s much more developed than I had originally intended because I enjoyed it so much and didn’t want to abandon it.

A lot more caricatured than my usual animals; some might say too much, so it doesn’t fit with the rest of the portfolio. But I have no doubt that the techniques I’m learning to allow me to draw something like this will still inform my future painted work and make it better.

It also provides me with an escape from the work, to draw and paint just for the fun of it, which is why I wanted to do this for a living in the first place.

Cheers,
Patrick

© Patrick LaMontagne
Follow me on Instagram @LaMontagneArt

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Sleepy Bear

It was tough to call this one finished as I was really enjoying it, especially over the last few days. I started it in the middle of October, but with editorial cartoons, a commission on deadline, and all of the other obligations of art for a living, it was tough finding the time to sit down and get lost in this piece.

The model for this painting was Manuka, a seven year old “white” black bear who lives at The Calgary Zoo. She’s a beautiful bear, a favorite of mine.

Manuka was a rescue from Elkford, BC in 2014 where she had become a nuisance bear, too familiar with people. It’s sadly a common tale; we see it in Canmore and Banff all the time. People leave food out on their decks, fail to keep clean campsites or tourists will actually feed bears on the side of the road, despite the many warnings from conservation officials or locals.

When a bear becomes habituated, associating people with food, there are usually only a few options. The bear can be relocated, which doesn’t have a high success rate, or it will be destroyed as it becomes a danger to people. Sadly, there are usually no consequences for the people who are responsible for the bear becoming habituated in the first place.

In rare cases, the bear might find a home at a rescue facility, like The Calgary Zoo or Discovery Wildlife Park, where their dependence on humans isn’t a problem. The bears then provide an opportunity for folks who work in conservation to educate the public on why we need to protect these animals, and be responsible while enjoying the great outdoors.

Manuka lives with two other black bears and they seem to get along quite well. They’ll often be seen chasing each other and playing in their large enclosure, which includes water and rock features, logs, trees and dens.

There is a massive prominent tree in that enclosure, and while all of the bears like climbing on it, often scaling it incredibly fast with ease, there is a large green platform about 30 feet up. Manuka can often be found up there napping, which is the reference I used for this painting. She looked right at the lens, slowly opening and closing her eyes, and I was thrilled when I got home and saw the photos I knew would inspire a painting.

I took the reference pics for this piece in August of last year, but when I started working on it last month, we were surrounded by fall colours. With the sleepy nature of the pose, the fact that the bears around here were getting ready to bed down for the winter, it seemed an appropriate palette and theme. I also expected to have it done before the season turned, but for reasons I mentioned above, it just didn’t happen.
Above is a practice piece I did of Manuka a couple of years ago, in the spring when she and her roommates were just waking up, but I hadn’t done a fully rendered painting of her until now. I’m glad I waited because I’m quite pleased with the results. Painting that fur while looking at that happy sleep face, I was reminded how fortunate I am to do this for a living.

This was painted in Adobe Photoshop on a Wacom Cintiq 24HD display. As always, photos are never part of my paintings, only used for reference. The finished file is 30″X40″. Prints should be available sometime in the New Year, both in my online store and at The Calgary Zoo.

Cheers,
Patrick

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Painting a Lion on the iPad

LioniPad
At one time, I experimented quite a bit with painting on the original iPad. When it would no longer support new updates, I replaced it with the iPad Mini with Retina Display, which is a horrible name, so it’s now just referred to as the iPad Mini 2.

Having tried a number of apps over the years and more than a few styli, I finally settled on the combo I liked best, which was the procreate app and the Wacom Intuos Creative Stylus 2, another unwieldy moniker. So, let’s just call it the ICS2.

While you’d be hard pressed to hear me say anything negative about Wacom’s Intuos tablets or Cintiq displays, the ICS2 has had some issues. Complaints of poor tracking and cursor alignment aren’t hard to find. It works well with some apps, not with others. I’ll simply say that there are plenty of people unhappy with the stylus, especially if they have the full-sized iPad 2.

I haven’t done much iPad painting lately because I’ve been busy working. In my home office, I have Wacom’s Cintiq 24HD display and when I want to draw elsewhere in the house, I have the more portable 13HD display. With these two professional options and my constant deadlines, drawing on the iPad hasn’t been a priority.

Recently, however, I stopped by the Apple store in Calgary and took the new iPad Pro and Apple Pencil for a test drive. A little later, I found myself in the Microsoft store comparing it to the Surface Pro 4.

I quite liked the iPad Pro and Pencil, easily the best stylus I’ve ever used on a device. It felt fine in my hand, had a contact feel I liked, was flawless in its accuracy and I wanted to use it more. While I didn’t get to try it with procreate on the store model, the sketch program they had on the tablet was good enough. I didn’t really like the Surface Pro drawing experience, but many people do.

My desktop computer is robust, I’ve got a powerful laptop, the Wacom displays I mentioned and an iPad Mini 2. I currently can’t justify buying an iPad Pro. It’s quite expensive and so is the pencil. It’s a want, not a need.

Playing around with it, though, got me itching to try some more iPad painting with the device and stylus I do have. This lion is the result.

At first, having not used procreate in quite some time; I was still having some issues with accuracy. I had to paint while holding the iPad in portrait mode. Whenever I tried to paint in landscape mode, the registration would be off. The same thing happens with Autodesk’s Sketchbook Mobile, another impressive app. From what I’ve read, it seems to be a flaw in the ICS2 software or hardware, not playing nice with third party apps. It’s frustrating.

Not one to easily give up, I started going through the settings again and found the Writing Style options. By trying different ones, I found the right setting for me and the accuracy came back! Painting this lion suddenly became a lot more fun when I didn’t have to fight the technology.
SettingsThe procreate app not only comes with an excellent selection of brushes for many different art styles, but their brush engine is quite good. I’ve always been one to design my own brushes, especially for hair, and procreate allows me to do that. It involves just as much trial and error experimentation as Photoshop brush design does, but by continually tweaking, I managed some pretty impressive results.

The downside of painting on the iPad…

Palm rejection does not seem to be flawless on any device with any stylus. I rest my hand on the screen when I draw and paint. Had I gone to art school or been professionally trained, they would have broken me of that, no doubt. The problem is that the device registers the palm/heel touch as an intentional brush stroke on many devices/apps so you end up with digital smudges and poor pen strokes from the stylus because the app is trying to interpret two points of contact.

My workaround is that I bought a pair of glove inserts, cut the index, middle, and thumb from it. This allows me to still use the touch features, but rest my hand on the screen without a problem. Fair warning, a very thin costume glove won’t work. The iPad will still sense the contact of your palm or heel of your hand.

Here’s a photo. Disregard the blown-out screen image as that’s not how it actually looks when I’m painting.
iPadHand

The second thing is that whenever I paint on the iPad, I have the display brightness set in the middle of the slider or lower. My Cintiq displays are set quite low as well, both the display brightness and backlight. It’s just easier on my eyes, especially since I can spend many hours in a day in front of a screen.

As a consequence, I usually have to do some colour and light adjustments to anything I paint on the iPad, or it will look far too dark when it’s done. For this, I use Snapseed and the relatively new Photoshop Fix, which are both quality image editing apps.

Even still, when this was as close to done as I could get it; I opened it in Photoshop on my desktop and did a couple more small lighting adjustments. All of the painting, however, was done on the iPad.

So, what’s the verdict?

It’s unlikely I’m going to be doing a lot more iPad painting with the tools I’ve got. It took longer to paint this than it would have on my professional displays and the result is not as nice or detailed as that which would have been achieved had I painted it all on my desktop or laptop.

Would that change if I bought an iPad Pro and Apple Pencil? I don’t know, but honestly, I kind of doubt it, even with the larger surface area to work with. I would still like to spend more time with it, though. In all things, however, it pays to experiment, especially with art. You never know until you try and this was worth doing, just for the experience.

Cheers,
Patrick

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Sketch Painting Offer

Anybody who has ever run their own business knows that it’s all one experiment after another.  In this day and age, our attention spans are shorter than ever so if you’re in the business of sales, you need to be looking for new ideas of promotion and catching people’s attention.

As an artist, the best way to do that is to continually produce new work.  It keeps you in the collective short term memory of those who have found it worthwhile to follow you.  The last thing an artist wants anybody to say about them is, “hey, whatever happened to that LaMontagne guy?”

While it’s true that I produce new editorial cartoons almost every day, many of the people who follow me on social media and my site are interested in my painted work, so it’s important that I keep them coming back.  It’s not enough to tell somebody where to find me; I’ve got to make sure I make it worth their time to do so.

My Totem and commission paintings take a great deal of my time to complete, mostly because I have other work to do at the same time, like those editorial cartoons I mentioned.  There can be weeks and sometimes (much to my horror) months in between finished full detail paintings.  That’s a lifetime in the online world.  While I’ll often post work-in-progress images during the process, I can’t always do that, especially if I’m working on a commission.  Ruining your client’s surprise gift is bad for business.

To improve my painting skills, satisfy my desire to work on new things and to keep that new work flowing, I started doing what I call ‘sketch paintings’ a while ago.  Some have taken exception to that title because they’re really not sketches and I’ll concede that.  I call them that because in my mind, they’re not finished pieces, meaning that they don’t contain the meticulous obsessive detail of my other work.

I’ve recently realized that people don’t care and it does me no good to disagree with them when they say they like a sketch painting as is.  That’s always good for business…tell your customers they’re wrong.  I’m a slow learner sometimes, but at least I eventually get there.

A number of people have asked about prints of the sketch paintings and I’ve declined to offer them because the work isn’t finished.  Again, somebody wants to give me money for my work and I’ve been telling them no.  This Canadian cartoon guy isn’t too bright.

So, in order to correct my error, I decided to order up of a small selection of sketch paintings and offer them up for sale.  They’re giclée professional quality prints, same paper and printing as my matted prints, but without the mat, bio, or clear sleeve.  An 8”X10” print, which includes a ½ inch white border and each is hand-signed.  They’re $15 each + shipping, which will be minimal because the print fits into a standard business envelope between two pieces of cardboard for protection.

This time around, only four of each was available, so it was first come, first served and newsletter subscribers had 24 hours to order before I posted the offer here.  As a result some of the images below are already sold out and there are only one or two of the others available at the time I posted this.  As they sell out, I’ll update this post to reflect that.  I already consider this a success as some sold out quickly and a few early responders still didn’t get the ones they wanted, so I will do this again.  Newsletter subscribers will still get first crack at them, so if you haven’t subscribed and want a shot at any future prints of this nature, I would encourage you to sign up at this link.

To order any of the available images below, send me an email to lamontagne@nullcartoonink.com with your mailing address and indicate whether or not you’d like me to send you a Paypal invoice or want to pay by Interac e-transfer. You can order as many as you’d like, while supplies last.

Hawk

Camel

Horse

Hummingbird

Hare

Rooster

YellowBird

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The Owls of Grassi Lakes

FinalHere’s my latest painting, entitled, “One in Every Family.”   In this case, it’s a family of Great Horned Owls that I had the privilege of watching for a few weeks in June.

Grassi Lakes here in Canmore is a short hike and easily accessible. It’s usually quite busy on weekends and during the summer, but if you get there early and take the difficult route (not that difficult), you meet relatively few people on the way up. If memory serves, it’s about a 20 minute hike one way, at a brisk pace.

The lakes themselves aren’t large, two connected ponds really. The attraction is their emerald colour. Seemingly iridescent blues and greens make for a very nice scene and it’s a popular spot for locals and tourists alike. Some benches, bridges and reinforced paths, and on one side of the far lake, you find a large rock face which is actually a fossilized Devonian coral reef. It’s also a popular climbing wall.

From the Wikipedia entry, the lakes “are named after Lawrence Grassi, an Italian miner who emigrated to Canada in 1912. After working with the Canadian Pacific Railway for several years he worked in the Canmore coal mines. Grassi also become a well-respected climbing guide as well as building many trails in the area including one to the Grassi Lakes which also bear his name.”

Grassi Lakes is great when I don`t have a lot of time, but still want to get some exercise. It’s picturesque, an interesting trail and at the lakes themselves, there is plenty of opportunity to take photos of Golden Mantle Ground Squirrels, a favorite critter of mine.

In the middle of last month, I was up at the lakes happily snapping pics of a ground squirrel when a woman came over to me and asked quietly, “Have you seen the owls?”

When I said that I hadn’t, she pointed across the lake to the rock wall. About 40 feet up is a little cave and sitting atop one of the rocks was a big Great Horned Owl. I thanked her and moved around the lake for a better look and with my camera at full zoom, I was able to see the owl very clearly. I could also see an owlet that until then had just looked like another rock. The camouflage was perfect.
003As it’s a provincial park, I wasn’t surprised to see an obvious red sign chained into the wall at ground level below the cave. I never actually went to read it, but somebody told me it was a warning that this particular climbing route was closed for the protection of the owls. Climbers were on the wall, but all were giving the nest a wide berth.

Over the next few weeks, I went back up to Grassi Lakes with a pair of binoculars (that I happily shared with interested tourists) and a tripod for the camera.   I took well over a thousand photos, most of them at full zoom, and probably ending up keeping a couple of dozen. Great for reference, not so much for print, but since I hadn’t planned on that; I was very pleased with the results.  The owls seemed to have no concern at the people watching from below and it usually took a raven or other bird flying by to capture their interest, although the little ones did seem fascinated by a couple of dogs splashing in the lake on one occasion.
002While I’ve painted a Great Horned Owl before, I honestly didn’t know much about them. With plenty of information online, I learned a great deal about what I was seeing, including the family dynamic, the breeding season, how long the owlets would stay with the parents…the info is easily found if you Google it.

During my visits, I was able to watch their behavior, saw both the male and female parents (the female is larger) and the two owlets. Both of them grew very fast and by my fifth visit, they looked quite a bit larger and their feathers had changed to look more like their parents and less like the fuzzy little balls of fluff that they are in the painting. They grew braver and started venturing out further along the rocks away from the cave, were actively hopping and flapping their wings, practicing their calls and mimicking their father, who seemed to spend the most time with them. A real joy to watch.

004On my sixth visit, I didn’t see them at all. A friend had said she didn’t see them the day before, either. Judging by what I’d read, my assumption is that they had learned to fly and although they do stay near the nest until the fall, my guess is that they’re also exploring their surroundings and learning to hunt. I don’t think I can expect to see the whole family hanging about the nest any longer, so I stopped going to see them.

Some locals have mentioned that the mating pair returns to that cave each year, as Great Horned Owls mate for life. The fact that I’ve never seen them before means I probably just wasn’t paying attention to that part of the wall on previous visits and they’re not obvious. I’m looking forward to next spring to see if they return and raise new young. A family of owls in the wild was a treat.

Initially, I was just going to do a few sketch paintings and move on. I started out with one of the adult male looking angry at some ravens that were harassing the nest, then another of one of the owlets trying out his lungs. The noise was truly pitiful and I laughed out loud while watching it.  Finally, I added the sibling to the initial owlet sketch painting, looking surprised. After that, I knew I was going to paint the whole family and that it would be a finished piece.  All of the sketch paintings and the final painting were done in Photoshop with a Wacom Cintiq display.

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007Maybe it’s because I’m a cartoonist and have this need to imbue animals with human characteristics, but watching the family interaction, I could imagine what was being said between the owlets and the parents. At one point, all of them sleeping in the sunshine, one of the owlets suddenly fluffed up and excitedly ruffled his wings. The father woke up suddenly, turned sharply to the owlet, and made some noises. I could have sworn he was saying, “Hey! Stop screwing around!”

I like to think that’s also his expression in the painting.

This whole experience was a real thrill and I think I’ll try painting more scenes like this, featuring other animals.  I’ve already got one in mind but likely won’t get to it right away. I’ve already got the reference, though, so you never know.

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Pre-orders are available for an 11″X14″ matted giclée print of “One in Every Family” until August 30th and they will be shipped in the latter half of September.  For more information or to order, follow this link.  Exshaw, Banff, and Canmore residents, please order by email for free delivery.

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Meerkat Painting Sketch

MeerkatSketchFB002One of my favorite stops when I visit The Calgary Zoo is the meerkat enclosure.  A colony will always have one meerkat standing guard, which puts him or her at the highest point in the area, keeping a lookout for predators.  It’s an instinctual trait as it occurs even with meerkats who are born in captivity.  They just take turns.  While they have nothing to fear from predators at the zoo, this behaviour is fantastic for taking reference photos.  You couldn’t ask for a better subject as one will turn this way and that, remaining as still and posed as a fashion model in a photo shoot.

This painting is still pretty rough but it was a lot of fun.  I will probably be painting more of these little critters in the near future.