Michelle Wrighton Fine Art and Photography

This gorgeous little calf just begged to painted, and in the spirit of exploring a bolder, less detailed, more expressive style I have painted this.  It definitely is fun to not be a slave to create every hair as realistic as possible, but I think I will keep playing and pushing tthrough expressionism and towards abstract maybe.

Colourful Calf Painting - © 2012 Michelle Wrighton

Living in a rural area provides me with a never ending supply of subject matter to photograph and paint.  Over the last few months, I’ve been able to obtain some beautiful reference photos of the calves and lambs on nearby farms, as well as many of our own Dorper sheep and our first lot of six lambs.  This one was painted before calving season started, but the expression on this little guys face depicts the curiosity of cows perfectly.

I think cows may be as curious as cats, maybe even more so.  Usually when I walk up to them with my camera they all run off a short distance then turn and look back at me.  Then there will always be one cow that has to come straight back to find out who I am and what I am doing and this one gives courage to the rest of them:)

This is another digital painting created using Painter XI and a Wacom Intuos 4 drawing tablet.

South west calf painting © Michelle Wrighton

The step by step image below shows how I develop the painting from the initial sketch, the colours I use in the underpainting and how the painting is built up in semi transparent glazes to create depth and texture.  I paint swatches of the colours I am using onto the background so that it is easy for me to pick up the correct base colour which I then lighten/darken as required.  I use a variety of different brushes and ‘digital’ mediums when I paint digitally, this was done a while ago I can’t remember which specific brushes I used, but I usually swap and change between oils, acrylics and pastels depending on what I am trying to achieve.  This is *not* something that you can do with traditional art mediums, although you can certainly mix mediums, there are specific processes required to ensure the stability of the painting such as oils over acrylic rather than the other way round.

Although I find it easy to paint very realistic details, creating a more ‘painterly’ image that I am happy with is more of a challenge.  I have exactly the same problem with painting in traditional paints and drawing with graphite or colour pencils, but digital painting has finally given me the opportunity to experiment with creating images that are less photo-realistic than most of my previous artwork.  Its a very refreshing change, and probably part of the reason that I enjoy digital painting so much.

step by step animal painting

Gifts for cow lovers, art prints, canvas prints and other merchandise featuring my original art, ‘South West Calf’ are now available for purchase from the Farm Animal Section on my Zazzle giftshop.