Cows have been very very good to me – the ones I’ve painted anyway. When I initially got notice of my painting Eat Chicken being considered to hang in a children’s hospital, it was the first time I ever thought about kids as an audience for my art. I had been toying with the idea of doing another cow painting, and the old nursery rhyme “Little Boy Blue” inspired the idea for my newest work, “Cow’s In The Corn.”
So I became more observant of cows while out riding around the rural area where I live. Always armed with my little point-and-shoot Sony Cybershot camera, I got some good photos of cow faces when my subjects were curious and came close to the fence between us. But I just wasn’t getting a winning pose. So I went back through my digital cow reference shots, and ended up, once again, with those I had taken on my “farm day” visit to my friends Susan and Dave years ago. There was the perfect face – a photo I had emailed to Susan just after my visit, since it was such a happy-looking cow… and Susan’s grandchildren had named her ‘Happy’ years earlier! Technically, this is not a female ‘cow’ since Susan and Dave raise males adopted from a dairy farm, but I’ll use that term generically. I loved his thrown-back head, the prominent mouth, the textured muzzle, the bulging eye, the little horns behind the ears, and the areas of black and white fur.
I had noticed corn was ripening in the fields around town, and made a tour in the car one sunny day to photograph thick rows of corn in different lighting. Then I bought some corn on the cob and pulled off some leaves (carefully) so I could study them and incorporate one into my composition, to hang out of the cow’s mouth. Voila, I was ready to get to work!
I wanted this new painting to be a companion to Eat Chicken, so I used the same primary colors of watercolor, the same size and weight of watercolor paper, and the same technique of pouring the colors and letting them blend randomly over my pencil sketch. You can see some of my pencil sketch through the paint in the top photo of my collage. I guided the wet paint away from some areas, or sprayed it with clear water to thin it, keeping pale or no color in some areas. I love the bright, clean color mixtures that this method creates, and aimed to preserve the luminescence as I painted. I also allowed little sparkles of white paper to remain in the top half of the paper, some of which became faint sunny twinkles in the final painting.
As usual with my animal paintings, I started with the eyes. This cow’s right eye popped out as he rolled his head back, with the other only barely visible. I wanted to keep the black-white contrast there, which would emphasize his eye as the focal point. My reference photo included only the cow’s head, so I added my own version of his body in profile, keeping it mostly as white fur to add more contrast with his face.
As I began to paint the corn in the top left, I decided I’d have to darken the cow’s ears and lighten the white fur at the top of his head in order to distinguish him from the busy colorful background. All three primary colors mixed together can create a nearly black hue. I hoped to maintain some of the glowing color I had already painting on the ears, but much of that was lost when I darkened the fur, unfortunately. Oh well, you can’t always get it right. You can see the difference from the 2nd photo to the 3rd in my collage. At least I fulfilled my goal of making him in better contrast with the corn stalks.
My watercolor paper is 300lb which is a thick heavy weight. This allows me to do some scrubbing and scraping without tearing the paper. In places like the top of the cow’s head, I re-wet the area with clean warm water, rubbed it with a stiff brush, and blotted off the dried pigment with clean dry paper towel to reveal the white of the watercolor paper better. There was one corn leaf in the top left which kept distracting me, the one falling horizontally; its color varied too much from the colors around it. So I similarly removed some of the yellow/orange color, let it dry, then repainted it with blue-green tones so it would be more harmonious. The bright red spot left of the tail bothered me too, so I blotted away some of the color to make it more subtle.
As a final step I took my x-acto knife and scratched through the paint to create stiff whiskers on the cow’s face, fluffy white hairs on the top of the head, bright whites in the eye and highlights on the nostrils and horns. I declared my happy cow painting finished, and emailed the image to Susan and Dave as the first to see it. They approved!
Eat Chicken has sold but I’ve reproduced it as giclee prints. I’m not so anxious to sell the original Cow’s In The Corn, so I’ll make giclee prints for sale also. I think the two images will make a fun grouping, hanging side-by-side.
