This was a commissioned gift from my uncle to my auntie. The man on the right is her father, he was a farmer up on the Glyn Mountain, which is near where I live, and that's his prize winning bull. The photo must have been taken around the nineteen fifties.
The undercoat of every painting I do is really just a scribbled mess, but it's very useful. It stops me getting too precious about the process. It shows where the light and dark sections are, and also creates a nice thick layer of paint for the top layer to sit on, making it nice and shiny. Acrylic paint which is too thin just looks dry and chalky.
As if by magic a finished painting emerges. I like taking photos of the painting in progress, because it's so easy to forget the stages that you have to go through to get there.
Seeing the original photo and the photo of the painting side by side I can see now that the bulls forehead is a too high, but it's easy to change that with acrylics because they dry so quickly.
I purposefully wanted a balance between sketchiness and detail, so the hands are just blobs, but making sure the planes of the face are in the right place is really important. The sketchiness of the background and his clothes acts as a nice balance for the detail in the face.
