Wildlife Art: an "Almost" Plein-Air

I'm often asked about my artistic process - what inspires me, how I paint, etc. Up until the last few years I painted mostly landscapes and the process was pretty simple:

1. Do several plein air (i.e., on-location) paintings of a scene.
2. If the scene warranted, do one or more larger studio works from those plein-air pieces.

Plein-air work is valuable for forcing the painter to simplify what she sees and to quickly put it down on canvas. It's also an unparalleled way to come to understand light, shadow, and color outdoors.

If you paint outdoors at all, you know that the camera doesn't begin to come close to your eyes in terms of seeing and recording the scene the way it really is.

Now that I'm painting mostly wildlife images, my process is a bit different. I still paint a few plein-air landscapes to keep my skills sharp, but painting wildflife on-location is challenging at best and usually impossible. Try getting an elk to stand still for an hour sometime - it just doesn't work! So for wildlife painting I rely heavily on my own sketches and photos, and my process is pretty straightforward:

1. Come up with an idea for a painting - from imagination or from reviewing my wildlife photos or sketches
2. Obtain reference material if needed (more photos, sketches, or plein-air paintings of the landscape)
3. Compose and sketch the painting to make sure composition and values work
4. Paint
5. If the painting turns out acceptably well, frame it and sell it!

Oftentimes the process takes months from inspiration or snapping a photo to the finish of a painting. Sometimes it's years before I use a good photo in a painting....but on rare occasions, the inspiration of painting happen all in the same day. I call these my "almost plein-air" wildlife paintings and one of them happened to me a couple of weeks ago.

One Sunday in late March I decided to take a walk around Florida Lake near Freeport, Maine. It's a rarely-visited park that's a haven for birds. Spring migration is starting so I brought my camera and tripod along in case I found some interesting animal subjects.

My luck was good - I found a beautiful pair of Ring-Necked Ducks. I observed and photographed them for 20 minutes while they simply hung out with eachother in the warm, early morning light...and while I was photographing them, the title of a painting came to mind: "A Companionable Silence." It seemed to fit the pair and the quiet of the morning.

I came home and immediately started in on the painting based on a slightly different view of the birds:

I realized that what struck me most about the scene was the golden, frosty quality to the morning light - so that's what I decided to highlight in this piece. Since the scene was so fresh in my mind I thought I stood a great chance of pulling it off - it was an "almost" plein air.

The first version I painted was a 24"x30" and included the drake, hen, and a decent handling of the background (slightly cropped view):

The painting itself had progressed quickly - I found it relatively easy to capture the quality of the light and the simplicity of the water reflections. I really felt in a painting "zone" while I was working on it. But there was something about it I didn't like but I didn't see what it was right away. I let the piece sit in my studio for a week, coming back to it the following Sunday.

Wow, it was obvious:  the view of the drake didn't work as well as I thought it would. While the view was technically accurate, it was just odd-looking in a painting and made his head appear deformed. I did like the hen's side of the painting though. I could have sanded down the paint surface of the drake and repainted him - definitely one option - but I'd honestly lost the "zing" I had when I painted the piece and I didn't think I'd be able to paint the new drake to match the lighting and atmosphere convincingly. I also wanted to be done with it so I decided to crop the whole thing quite drastically. After playing around with several different options for crops, this is the one I decided on (from 24"x30" to 15"x16"):

I also changed the name to "Solitude."

While the painting didn't turn out exactly as I had planned I still felt it was a success. Yes, the painting itself "works" but even more valuable for me was realilzing how much easier it was to capture the feel of a place if I painted it as close in time as possible to the when I saw it. In this case, the time between photographing the scene and starting the painting was about 90 minutes.

All images copyright Nancy Rynes, 2012. You may share this blog post, but you may not use these images in any other way without my permission.