Did you see my previous post, the one about the shawl that I crocheted for the mother of a friend of mine, mostly because I once again had NO IDEA what to give her for Christmas?  It’s still sitting on my dining room table, waiting to be boxed and sent with the thing I finished this morning for the shawl recipient’s daughter, AKA my British friend-forever-since -we-were-penpals-in-elementary-school, and you DON’T want to ask me how long that’s been.

Anyway, like for her mother, I never know what to send this friend of mine.  As I was working on the shawl, I had a lightbulb/crazy idea moment.  Why not make something for her as well?

My friend is crazy about wolves.  She loves photos of wolves, paintings of wolves, and I’ve seen her swoon over fuzzy throws with wolf images on them–really just about anything with a wolf on it.  She’s asked me for years to paint her a wolf, and although I like to paint, I was nervous about trying something like a wolf.  And although I’ve painted animals in the past, I always found it incredibly hard, and not something I’m terribly good at.

But I decided to throw caution to the winds, and this weekend I decided to try painting a wolf.  This year I’ll do it.  I’ll paint a wolf, or try anyway.

I chose an 8 X 10 canvas, because it’s a nice small size.  And I chose an online photo of just the head of a wolf, because why make things any harder than I had to?

I started with drawing the basic outline of a wolf on the canvas, then filling it in with a basecoat of colors.  I thought that I was doing pretty well at this point:

I moved on, confident that THIS time I had this whole painting an animal thing figured out.  I started painting fur.  Lots and lots of hairs of fur.  When I sat back and looked at my painting, I felt heartsick.  My pretty good beginning had become an overworked, amateurish picture:

Wow, not good.  And what’s with that mouth?  And the fat face?  He was morphing into a bear or something.  Frustrated, I kept painting, putting in more hairs of fur, making it look worse and worse, choppier and choppier.

I finally threw down my liner brush, realizing that I was just making a bad situation worse.  What to do?  I was tempted to give it up as a bad idea, but that just made me even more annoyed.

I decided to go online and look at real artists’ wolf paintings.  What I saw is that good artists don’t try to paint every single hair of the fur.  I figured out that I was probably using the wrong type of brush.  I pulled out a small, flat brush, loaded it with gray paint, and holding the brush vertical, started making small, light strokes over the hairs on the forehead.  It seemed like it was looking better, and I was eager to see how it would work on the lighter areas.  I began moving back and forth between the gray and white areas.  Then I worked on the mouth, worked on the eyes, and basically reworked every part of my wolf.

Here is the result:

 

I’m calling this done, mostly because I really don’t think my skill level can take me any further with this painting.  So it’s varnished and put in a frame I bought at Walmart (I took the glass out).

I’ll send it, and the shawl, to my friends in a day or two, when I’m more certain that the painting is dry enough to be wrapped and packed for its journey across the ocean.

I hope my friend likes it.  If not, at least it gave me the opportunity to grow a bit as an artist.

That doesn’t mean I’m painting more wolves anytime soon.