polar, in progress.

Have you been watching Frozen Planet? I don't watch much television, but I love pretty much anything on the Discovery Channel and was so excited when I saw there was another series of Planet Earth-esque documentaries. Aside from just being interesting to watch I'm totally in awe of the filmographers who spend years of their lives in insane conditions capturing things on film that most of us would otherwise live our whole lives never seeing. Because I definitely want to see polar bears doing polar bear things.

Using the last episode for inspiration I started this piece last night, sort of randomly, as the only time I've ever used acrylics to paint an animal before was a quail I gave to my mom last Christmas.  It was challenging... I had to sketch for quite a while before I got these bears "right"... but once I did it was easy to paint them onto canvas.

The light in my studio is pretty lame at night so I took these progress photos with my phone... it's a little piece, only 20"x16", but there's a lot going on... lots of layers and details. I think this will be the start of a lot of new, different work for this spring. Exciting!

You can see each of these Instagram photos in detail on my Flickr photostream.