No. 353: "Can you put an ass on a deer?"

No. 353, "New Day Rising" by Tom Wills, Christmas 2016. Watercolor.

No. 353 is called "New Day Rising." It depicts a strong buck overlooking frosty fields, surveying his territory. The painting is based upon a photo taken from a tree-mounted camera, set off by motion sensor. It captured the deer and a friend blew up the photo, then asked me to paint it.

But because the camera captured only half of the deer, he asked: "Can you put an ass on a deer?"
So I thought on that a few seconds and said, "Why not?"

Deer-cam

I spent a little time trolling the internet for deer, and their asses (um, not at work!). There are differences, you see. First, you wouldn't want a doe butt on a buck. And you wouldn't want a caribou hind end on a white tailed deer.

Ass-cam

So, some mixing and matching went on until I found a suitable donor, and then I grafted it on -- with Scotch tape -- and drew it. No Photoshopping here!

Hello Goodbye

My pal, a repeat customer, wanted the deer centered on the painting, but also wanted to show all of the various trails and features on his property. So I placed the buck's head in the center, keeping open the full view of the original landscape, and guessed a little on the right side, which was not in the photo. I laid it out first in a sketch, which I then erased over, to lighten or hide the pencil marks.  It's sad to erase a drawing!

Moooooooooooo

I started painting the deer first, and for a while it resembled a cow until I added the antlers and lightened up his body with yellows, oranges, browns and whites.

Deer-scaping.

Next came for landscape, or valley. The original photo was a murky and faded, so I used my best guesses and made the fields and trails look like fall, and frosty. The predominant colors, surprisingly, are mixtures of orange and purple, muted by a brown wash and a little blue at the top.

Grass, before it looked like grass.

The admittedly odd thing here is that the grass is green, as it is in the photo. I suppose that's possible -- my own lawn is green long after the neighboring corn and soybean fills are turned under and gone brown.  So I set about creating the grasses, the most time-consuming portion of the project.

See the goldenrod wash?

I first applied a wash of green, then blue, and then brown. I used a dark green to create little mounds and make the ground look uneven  I then used all sorts of hash marks to try and simulate blades of grass -- black, green, brown, yellow and some frosty white, for good measure. And then I painted over the whole thing with a goldenrod color.

We shall call him "Confusion."

This is a large painting and we want to find a rustic but light-colored frame after the new year. I understand it's going to hang in a cabin-retreat. Who knows, maybe the big guy will stroll past again and look in the window, seeing his image on a wall.

What would he think of that?
"Dat ass!"