Painting #135, a weird day

Today started rather strange, woke up and looked at the clock to see how late I'd slept, and no power. I freaked, it was not storming, on the contrary, the sun was shining, so what gives? I couldn't even use my cell phone, no cell tower either. I drove to the neighbors, and they didn't have power either, weird! It didn't come back on until sometime after 2:00 p.m., so it was like being stranded a bit, luckily I got most of my blog painting done (nothing else I could do except read, which I did), I taught watercolors in Sturgis tonight, and now I'm home, maybe I can get to bed before 1:00 or 2:00 a.m., staying up that late makes the days pretty long.

Today's painting is from a couple photo's my friend let me have, of these lama's, they were on 2 different photo's, I liked the pose of the smaller one, but I beileve it was taken some time after they had sheared it, the hair was much shorter, the other one was a really nice up close photo, but it doesn't look happy, looks to me like he was getting ready to spit, I understand they do that, but I think it carries well with the two, I just lengthened the hair on the one and changed the lighting just a bit so they looked like they were in the same setting, I was going to put the background scenery in, but, I decided after it was about 3/4 done, that it looked better without the trees, so I painted them out and just put in the purple, it really ramps up the contrast of the light against the dark.

I started with the scenery, and then painted the shape of the lama's, getting the shape of the head was a bit of a trouble, but, finally got it, I still had to adjust it even then, but this is close, not perfect but close. The eyes and muzzle really say lama, I changed the color in the background and then added more white wispy hairs to finish it, I'm very happy with this painting, I hope you like it too.