"Grazing with mum"
Oil on stretched canvas, 8x10 inch
SOLD

I love to paint longhorns since I live in Texas. If you see a longhorn, you think Texas. Well, at least I do. They are around to see and touch when the rodeo is in town in februari each year. You can also see them grazing if you drive just out of the city.

Because I am painting daily now (thanks to Carol Marine's book "daily painting", she has been a huge inspiration for me), I feel more confident to paint loose and bold. I use bigger brushes and found out that blocking in the background can be done with a lot of color variation to make it more interesting instantly from the start. Greg Nelson describes this technique in his book "60 minutes to better painting", I learned a lot from this book. I love the quickness in his paintings and how he describes it so very well.

I usually tone the canvas with a wiped out layer of burned sienna and block the darks with a darker layer of burned sienna. I wipe out the lights where necessary and I can better create the dark & light values after that.
Now I tried to block in with different tones. Burned sienna for the head, add ultramarine for the shadowparts underneath the belly and burned umber in the neck of the calf.
It helps me not to see an animal but just colortones (in the context of: paint what you see, not what you think you see).
Interesting...