This scene is based on references I took while my wife and I honeymooned in Alaska. I constructed the scene and changed it a couple times before I settled on this. At first it was a forest scene and I had the basic shapes of the trees blocked in but then I totally painted over them and changed it to a sub-arctic scene.
I have been cruising along getting ready for the Waterfowl Festival next weekend. This is one of the most recent paintings I did for the show. I used think impasto palette knife work for the dried leaves in the foreground. It was a fun painting to do.
A Great Blue Heron in the cold but beautiful misty morning light of late autumn. The wetland is very quiet but this lone hunter searches for his breakfast before moving south to warmer weather.
I basically came up with the scene out of my imagination, a misty morning 
This is a Grizzly Bear my wife and I saw on our honeymoon in Alaska. The landscape is from southern Alaska, on the Kenai peninsula, the area we saw the bear at.
This is probably what you would call a mud-head sketch. Mud-head meaning that you don't focus on any details of the head, just the tones and colors. Using a photo (since little children don't' sit still) I first drew this little girl in pencil, then I took her out into a field close to sunset and had her stand as still as possible while I painted her. This little cutie spent most of the time slowly walking around but this was enough for me to get the basic tones down, tones that you could never get from a photo reference alone. I plan to do a larger version of this.
I did this little oil sketch a couple weekends ago from Peter's Orchards in Pennsylvania. It was an incredible view from the top of this hill. My main objective was to capture the atmospheric effects and lighting via the tonal values displayed.
