Isaac J. DeHaven , "Mountain Landscape at Dawn"

Acrylic on 5x7 Canvas, 2020

For my first painting, I painted a landscape. I look up to Bob Ross, and I wanted to incorporate some of the things I find inspiring when I feel encouraged watching him work, such as scraping the paint with a flat edge to bring the mountains and pine trees into shape.  I value feeling peaceful, and a sense of peace and serenity comes naturally when painting something like a sunrise over a beautiful space.  I hoped to make not just the experience of painting this a soothing thing, but looking at it thereafter, too. 

 One thing that I found to be a challenge that required the hardest work was to get the reflection on the lake to match the mountains themselves accurately.  One of the things that I am the most proud of is the dimension and lighting I created in the mountains.  I like that I created a picture that makes me feel, "Wow, I would like to see that landscape and that sunset with my own eyes because it makes me feel at peace."

Isaac J. DeHaven, "Painted Elk"

Acrylic on 5x7 Canvas, 2020

For my second painting, I turned to my love of wildlife and chose to paint an elk.  I am on the new side of using acrylics, and I thought that an animal like a deer or elk would give me some different kinds of textures to work on.  I'm the most satisfied with how his head and antlers turned out.  I feel like I did a nice job on the proportions in the face and the positiong of the elk in the frame to be balanced.  I also think elk are majestic animals, and I captured that sense of calm strength and authority over his space in this elk. 

 One thing that I would like to change next time is to not the rush the background and create more detail.  Actually, over winter break, I painted a deer picture, similar to this one, to give to my grandparents for Christmas, and when I did it, I worked on kind of improving the things I wanted to do better on next time around when looking back at this one (that picture, the one for my grandparents, is the background to this page, so you can see it, too, if you can around this foreground stuff).  As you can see, this elk picture was important enough to me to want to sit back down and expand on workimg on the topic, even when I was done with this actual painting for class.  I hope you find it an interesting subject and painting, too.