Stalking wolf painting update: those furry ears!

It seems I am stalling at finishing the ears of my wolf...perhaps that is because I am having some difficulty with them.
The main reason is because the original reference image had the ears folded back and I did not want to portray them that way on my painting as I felt it made the wolf look too mean. So I hunted the reference library for "better" forward facing wolf ears to use as a guide. 
You may notice the ears are now slightly smaller and shaped differently from my original outline. Let's hope this works! 
My second excuse is I am having trouble getting focused on painting during this busy holiday season. Too many things to do in so little time but I do hope to finish him before the new year!!

A few bird paintings waiting in the wings...

I want to get a few bird paintings finished in the next few weeks and decided to start one using suede because I can usually complete them faster than on other surfaces. I have another started of an African crowned crane using pastel on sandpaper and I will be working on that one as well.

I have several other paintings that have been started and need to revisit the easel so I can complete them. I hope to get to all of those before summer sets in as I hardly have time to paint then when most of my time is devoted to field work and collecting reference photographs.

The new bird painting below is of a sparrow on a barbed fence wire.

White Tiger Cub Painting in pastel

As promised, I am revealing the finished tiger painting now that the official opening reception of the exhibit has passed...

"Enthralled"

white tiger cub

14' x 14"

pastel on archival paper

Another bird painting on the easel

For my next project, I thought it would be exciting to create a nontraditional composition of a familiar birds' cropped face, close-up.
Many of you might recognize this national iconic bird already, with only just the eye showing. Once again, I am using a variety of pastel pencils on archival sanded paper.

Slowly but surely...

In this step I'm almost done adding the colors to the deer's coat. I've had to add several colors in layers to hide the dark suede and to achieve the desired colors (we don't always have the exact color match). Let's just hope all those layers of pastel stay on the suede!

I will most likely be spraying the finished piece with a fixative to prevent dust from falling off and smudging the painting. This will darken the colors a bit and will help tone down the painting.

Deer Painting-Update

I'm so pleased that the backdrop greenery is just about complete. It was way easier than I first anticipated. Phew! I will be going back to the background a bit later and tone down some of the brightness on a few leafy areas to the left of the painting (I still find it a bit too bright).

Creating the deer's coat with the light shadows/reflections is proving to be quite interesting. I am currently using about 6 or 7 different colors of pastel to get the right intensities.

Red Squirrels painting in pastel-update

Click image for larger view.

Hard to imagine that this painting is about 40% complete. I rarely attempt paintings of this size (17' x22") or one with such a complex setting such as this maple bush scene. I guess that is one reason why it is taking me so long. There are already many layers of pastel layed down and lots of mixing going on. I'm happy with it so far.