An Artist's Sketchbook

Sampson WIP (work in progress)

I decided to post a WIP of this painting of Sampson. Sampson is from a local (about 40 minutes away) big cat santuary. The Western Pennsylvania National Wild Animal Orphanage cares for wounded and rescued big cats. I pulled this image from their website. I hope to contact Dr. Sheperd to see if he would grant me access to the orphanage to paint/sketch the cats. I am fortunate to have a facility like this so close to home. Well, if you consider 40 minute away close. Which I do considering my commute to work is 60 minutes each way.

I would like to find a way to create a mutually beneficial releationship with the orphanage. Being that I am broke most of the time I don't have much money to offer in exchange for excess to the cats. Perhaps I could offer my time/labor or even proceeds from sales of paintings. I would prefer to offer proceeds, but I would feel a bit of a fraud if we agreed to that and I didn't sale many, if any, paintings. This is a topic I will have to pose to the members of Wetcanvas. I am sure I could get some feedback regarding this. Certainly someone out there has dealt with this kind of situation.

Anyway, I am getting off topic.. on with the painting. I am posting this WIP to help with my thought process. THe daily paintings are created on instinct more than anything and I want to have a developed conscious plan for my larger works. By posting and talking myself through the process I hope to learn a bit about my approach and learn what does/doesn't work.

This is 9"x16" and will be painted in oil on hardboard panel. This is my underdrawing which will be my roadmap. I used a grid method to scale up my drawing so that the marking on Sampson are as accurate as possible. I sketched this out using a mechanical pencil and then sprayed it with fixative to keep the drawing from smearing when I begin to apply the paint.

This is a shot showing my reference image with the panel. I print out reference images to have at my easel, but mostly I will use the image displayed on my computer, which is across the room to my right, to work from. I do this in the beginning stages because it helps me to see the larger shapes and keeps me from getting into the details right away.