The Real Iris

"The Real Iris"  (pastel, 6x6 inches)  click here to bid

This friendly young cow really is named Iris! Many thanks again to Frances of the Garden Gallery for the great photos!

And... your sneak peek for today... two new underpaintings, and early pastel progress on the longhorn calves I posted a few days ago:

new underpainting, 32x32 inches

new underpainting "Generations", 36x36 inches

The underpainting above uses my usual gold and terra cotta pastel primers, and then I added white. For those of you new to my process, the Gold primer is Quiacridone Nickel Azo Gold fluid acrylic color mixed into Golden (brand) Fine Pumice Gel. The gel is clear, so the color mixture is semi-transparent, and gets darker on each application. The terra cotta and the white are both Art Spectrum (brand) Pastel Primer, which is opaque, but I do scuffle and dry-brush it on in some areas.
(No, that's not a volcano behind the adult longhorn. Ha! What looks like smoke rising is where the gold primer overlapped on the initial application. That won't show when I'm done with the sky. The hill is my first attempt at some sort of background element. Supposed to be a tree line. Most likely it will change as I'm not sure I like the shape of it so far.)

And below is how far I got today on my first of this big batch.. (see the underpainting at the bottom of last Wednesday's post!) Started with the the darks and cooling down the shadows, with a bit of the highlights in for balance.

Hopefully, these new ones will all be with me at the Bayou City Art Festival in Houston, March 27-29. You can find me in Booth #3 near the main entrance!