Strawberry deer in soft pastels

I want to love painting landscapes. Honestly, I do. But what can I say, I love me my animals.

This painting was kinda unplanned. The last landscape piece left me feeling meh, so I thought I'd have a change of pace by drawing a flower with oil pastels. But after accidentally using the textured side of Canson Mi-Teintes and feeling my blood pressure rapidly rise while I fought that ridiculous honeycomb pattern, I finally admitted defeat halfway and dumped the drawing. 

Failed drawings are always frustrating and I was feeling really bleah, but didn't want to go to bed without having done any good painting, so I decided to go back to my pet subject - animals. I went with this sweet reference photo from PaintMyPhoto.

Photo: Lenora Melville

My intent was to use some of the techniques I'd learned from Marla Bagetta towards a more Impressionist style, using suggestive marks instead of going for realism. I used brown Canson Mi-Teintes Touch paper and started with a simple sketch and blocked in some of the dark areas.

Then instead of doing the background first like I usually do, I coloured the deer right away. I tried to make big marks but it didn't quite work. I don't know why the mark making doesn't come out clean and bright, but muted and blurry. This is despite me not doing any blending with my fingers at all. Is it the paper again? I'm starting to think that the Impressionistic style only works on Pastelmat. Wasn't feeling great at this point.

So I decided to go for broke. If I'm going to experiment, let's experiment! Instead of sticking with browns, I whipped out the pinks. (I think my most used pastels have to be the three Mungyo Gallery bright pinks. I use them in almost every painting.) Never heard of a pink deer? Never fear!

When I was done, I was feeling MUCH better. I love this deer! Who would have thought pink could work on a deer? Our brains are funny - they try to create their own logic by telling our eyes that the deer is brown, but I took this photo to show the pastels I used - it's really mostly pinks and oranges.

Then it was time for the background. This is not my forte at all, so I can't complain about the outcome, It really is the best I can do for now.

I had to think about what to do for the foreground. There was no way I could copy the photo reference, I wouldn't be able to paint all that grass and twigs convincingly. So I decided to simplify and just do a cross-hatch ground for the fawn to sit on. 

Again, I thought, let's use pink! (It really is my favourite painting colour). If I can have a pink deer, I can have it sit on a pink field. The important thing is to make sure the light and shadows are depicted correctly. So I layered on the pinks. Strawberry fields, anyone?

Finally, I added some yellows, browns and increased the contrast by deepening the darks. And I'm done. It's still not as painterly as I had hoped for, but it's looser than any other animal painting I've done, and that makes me happy. I hadn't intended to finish this in one night, but I was enjoying it so much that I completed it in one sitting. Took me about three hours...I think I'm getting quicker.

I'll still soldier on with my landscapes, but deep down, I know I'm an animal painter at heart.