Great Horned Owl – Focus Art – Dry Brush Oil Painting

This Great Horned Owl is the second painting in my series of Focus Paintings in which I try to make the viewer focus on the most important features of the figure before slowly disintegrating from a realistic painting into sketchy pencil lines.

GREAT HORNED OWL - FOCUS ART - This isn't the first time I've painted a Great Horned Owl, and it was actually my earlier version from many years ago that first inspired me to come up with this style. I had painted the eyes and felt that the painting looked finished - even though it hardly was! Well, that idea stayed with me for a long time and I decided to purposely paint pictures in this way.

GREAT HORNED OWL – FOCUS ART – This isn’t the first time I’ve painted a Great Horned Owl, and it was actually my earlier version from many years ago that first inspired me to come up with this style. I had painted the eyes and felt that the painting looked finished – even though it hardly was! Well, that idea stayed with me for a long time and I decided to purposely paint pictures in this way.

This was a real pleasure to paint, because the eyes are not only big, vibrant, and captivating, but they also have a very nice ring of feathers around them that help spotlight your focus on them even more. It was interesting painting feathers using this new dry brush technique – it is still only the second time that I’ve used it, but it sped up my painting speed by hours and hours and I think I’m going to stick with it for a long time to come!

I think that I did a good job making the feathers look soft and delicate. To create the image of this owl I photoshopped three different owls together to make it look just right. I added some ‘morning shade’ blue to the white highlights of the breast to make it more interesting, and probably could have added a little more sketch lines – but when you see it in person you will notice that the painting does a good job blending from painting to pencil. It makes it hard to even notice the transition it is so smooth.

If you read the caption under the photo you will see that this whole “FOCUSED ART” style was inspired by an earlier painting of an owl. I figured I would upload it here so you could see what I mean. This was done using watercolour.

Michael Slotwinski. Watercolour Study, 2011.

This is my second attempt at this painting. I was more focused on capturing the life of the animal in the eyes than anything else. I quite like the incomplete look and think I may expand on this later on.