In the mean time I have blocked in this painting 15"x22" Oil. This is a painting from several years ago when I took a number of photos above Brooks Lake. I did a gouache watercolor from that little trip that I won an award on and was published in an art magazine. Everytime I run across this photo it begs to be made into a painting. This past summer Les Llefevre and I were back up in this area on a hike into Jade Lake and I began thinking at that time about doing this painting. You can check out that trip with its beautiful waterfalls in my OUTDOOR ADVENTURES blog from early September of last year. There is in fact a photo from that trip that is tugging at me too. So here goes.

Last sunday Vicki and I drove up Horse Creek road just to try and cure a little cabin fever. Dubois has had very little snow this winter and the mountains are about 50% of normal but that doesn't mean there is no snow up there. All the roads around Dubois are unimproved and in some cases no more than cow trails. About 10 mile north of town we were in freshly fallen snow and no tracks showing that we were the only people to have traveled up that way in the past 24 hours. We had spotted 3 Buck Mule Deer and watched them awhile and a little further up the road decided to turn around. Still on crutches I don't relish becoming stuck and doing any digging out. Going back down the road we discovered a nice herd of does and fawns on the steep hillside from where the bucks had been and I took a number of photos of them. Thinking about this group I have begun to formulate an idea in my mind. I really like the setting and am playing with the idea of running these deer up the hillside in a verticle format. I am now playing around with some ideas to do a painting and thought I would start this one by giving my blogging friends insight of where my idea and thought patterns might take me. I'll try and show off some of my sketches and paper thoughts as I go along. It might take another week or so of still playing around but I do have that nagging plan to do something great. Aren't all our ideas on paintings great at this point. It may turn out to be a fire starter but lets see where it goes.