Postcard No 10: Life by the River
Living by the Huon River it’s not all about the water and the boats there are lot’s of other subjects to catch my eye as I journey up and down beside the river. Today it was the cows checking me out over the barbed wire fence . They were happily chewing their respective cuds and enjoying a spot of sunshine in a paddock that runs down to the river. Sometimes it’s good to paint something other that my usual subjects so I had a bash at the cows ( not literally! I didn’t pick up a dead tree branch and whack them …I picked up my small flat brush and painted them with my small set of Turner Acrylic Gouache.)
You can probably tell I don’t paint cows often! That white one has a deer like face for a start. I’ve managed better with the brown one and also got the body planes OK.
The lesson from this one is …more practice! To be fair I can paint cows it just takes me a long time and I’ve really time limited these little postcards.
I plan to go out and take some photos of cows and get familiar with their facial planes and the general shapes of their bodies because I would like to be able to paint them with ease and that only comes with understanding their structure and then putting in the brush miles.
The more I paint a subject the better my muscle memory gets and the less I have to think about it as I paint.
You know I didn’t really want to share this one because they don’t really look like cows but as I often say when teaching…we learn more from our failures than our successes. How do you feel about sharing your less successful work? Does it help you see it with fresh eyes and realise there are good passages amongst the less good? Or do you just throw them in a box under the bed? Full disclosure, I used to have a box under the bed but I sent it to the rubbish tip when we moved house recently!
Lindy Whitton Studio 
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