Experimenting with paint: I'm at the end of a freelance deadline and for some reason, my head started hurting today. I have been on the computer a lot, inking and this has never happened before. I took a painting break and finished this one. I have been working back and forth with paint layers and gloss layers. Nothing beats the fun of pushing real tools around.

If something looks familiar, I did steal the pose of the photo of the real liger at the bottom. I tried to paint it, but the head on pose looked awful; so I repainted over the face by using my notes from my sketchbook and made it into a 3/4 head portrait.

Paintings of the past. I love painting small mini-portraits, especially people of color. Homeless is done on canvas board with acrylic, and the grouping is done with acrylic on board. It is a small piece.

Oscar Grillo, you were right. I looked up Ligers and this is what it had to say: The drive-through wildlife park, (Wild Animal Safari in Pine Mountain, Georgia), is believed to have the country's largest concentration of ligers, housing ten of the massive cats.

Since 1999 the park has bred its male lion and female tiger many times, producing about 24 cubs.

Not all of them have been healthy, though.

"We've had 3 out of 24 that, for all practical purposes, were normal but developed as they grew older some kind of neurological disorder," Hutcherson said.

Autopsies didn't reveal what caused the cubs to develop "head shakes," so park staff "chalked it up to a genetic defect," Hutcherson said.

Pictured here is a liger, Patrick, who came from a zoo in Illinois. He is now at Shambala Preserve near Acton. Ligers were brought to the public's attention after they were mentioned in the movie, "Napoleon Dynamite."

Again, thanks for your thoughtful and humane comment, Oscar.

Some paintings done a few years ago; different styles. The monochromatic one was done when I was learning to paint; hence the stiff photographic style. The only part I really like was when I loosened up with her collar. The other is one of my very favorite paintings because of the lush colors and looseness of the brush--something that was foreign to me at the time.

wow. I finally just got blogger to work again. Back to the big cats again. I've done this one before, but i played with the brushstrokes more and "loosened" up. I like this one much better. Very limited palette; burnt umber, naples yellow, burnt sienna (for the redder tones), titanium white and raw umber in everything. A limited palette will help me establish values.

Some old paintings I did in the past. Alanis was actually painted in my sketchbook.