I just finished this painting of a pair of pronghorn antelope. Let me explain the thought process behind this painting,
Painting animals in the wild is much more believable when you've witnessed the scene first hand. I've witnessed several pronghorns standing in open fields of sage brush with either the morning or evening light striking the background mountain and rock formations. In this scene I wanted the pronghorns and the light to tell the story.
I like to leave it up to the viewer if it's morning or evening light in a lot of my paintings. This gives the viewer the chance to use their own imagination when looking at your art piece not to mention having someone looking for a morning painting but you name it something like "evening light" and they don't buy it because their morning people. Problem solved! I just make mine neutral from now on because I've made that mistake plenty of times in the past. Painting light hitting just the top part of mountains takes a little practice and I suggest using photographic reference to get it to look right. I used a number of colors to paint these mountains. On the light side I used orange, yellow, crimson, and red. I didn't mix any of the colors I just put the color on the canvas straight from the tube of paint and let them mix somewhat while putting the color on the canvas. This gives it more of a rocky and rugged effect. On the dark side I used burnt umber, blue, crimson, and even a little bit of phthalo green. Now the mistake a lot of people make is painting the mountains and then putting the field right over the bottom of them in the next layer. This is fine in some cases but in this painting I want everything connected so I brought the bottom of the closest hill forward into the sagebrush field making the mountains look like you can walk around different ridges. This gives the viewer the feeling of exploration. They almost feel like they can walk into the painting and they want to know what's going on behind every ridge of that mountain range.
This original painting is up for sale and like always I have 500 prints that will be signed and numbered for sale as well. Thank you and you can order the prints from this link