'Wolf Head'

Well, almost into the new year, hope everyone had a lovely Christmas!

I try and take photographs of my paintings during progression to post on my site and also to use as a visual aid to show to my students. I thought I would post one of the oil paintings I completed for my exhibition to show the stages involved, actually it was the very last one I finished for the exhibition pretty much a week before setting up!

The first stage is just a simple pencil freehand sketch onto gessoed panel before I then add a thin layer of lean oil paint as a ground and take out any areas I want to leave light. I then start to lay down layers of translucent washes in picture 3 making sure I keep the paint lean and loose. 

After that stage has been allowed to dry I start building layers of translucent and opaque layers in a 'fatter' paint, the outcome is that some areas have the early layers showing through and other areas have a lot of opaque paint, this hopefully gives an illusion of depth to the fur. I also decided to change the background colour at this stage to frame the wolf head and once dried the final painting can be seen on display at the exhibition!