I'm currently working on a grizzly bear, mixed media on Arches hot press watercolour paper.
Whilst on holiday in Canada I was lucky enough to see grizzly bears in the wild although not close enough to get good photographs. However we visited the British Columbia wildlife park and they had two young grizzly bears, a brother and sister who had arrived at the park when their mother was killed. I took a lot of photographs of the bears interacting and want to paint a large picture of them play fighting. As I've never painted a bear I decided to start with one bear in a straight forward pose.
I was drawn to this photo both because of the bears expression and the lighting.

So far I've been working in watercolour and adding the detail in coloured pencil. I'm not planning on adding a background at this stage although I might airbrush some dark foliage later.




Unfortunately when I started on the background the airbrush left some blobs of paint on the paper that I couldn't hide or remove so I restarted the bear in acrylic paint on board. I started with a blurry green background but changed it to a dark blue/black.
I have quite a bit more