Roe deer resting Painting

It was the middle of the freeze. Red and green were a subconscious reference to the traditional Christmas colour scheme. I thought back to summer, and that brought me to roe. The simplicity of the two colours gave me a way in. I drew directly onto the canvas, the deer occupying the central two thirds and the vegetation in two bands above and below them to suggest space. The animals are massed in a single block of Light Red. Looking closely you will see that adjoining blocks in their coats have different brush stroke directions following the contours of their bodies. The coarse hair in the buck’s ears and the pearling on his antlers and the caudal patches are painted impasto. Their faces have been worked up in several layers of semi dry brush strokes over the red base. I took liberties with their limbs for the sake of composition, moving the two deer close together to have rhyming shapes, with the doe behind the buck as if he was guarding her as she slept. I marked the difference between them by putting the buck’s antlers in the centre of the image and elaborating the caudal tush of the doe to the right. The deer are darker than they normally appear because I had seen them in the low light before sun up. The dark red I used as a base for their coats set the colour pallet for the background vegetation and the weeds around them. Dark foliage for the background hedge and acid greens for the weeds in the foreground. The weeds are arranged aggressively to emphasise their vigour and splayed out horizontally to remind you of what the animals had done to make their scrapes. At the bottom left they have been reduced to a paste. The deer are darker than they normally appear because I had seen them in the low light before sun up. The dark red I used as a base for their coats set the colour pallet for the background vegetation and the weeds around them. Dark foliage for the background hedge.

Painting:Oil on Canvas

Original:One-of-a-kind Artwork

Size:31.5 W x 23.6 H x 0.8 D in

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