Highland Wildlife Park

As I said on Friday, my sister is with us for a few days, so yesterday, the two of us went out for the day to the Highland Wildlife Park at Kincraig. It's a long way from Wick - took about 3 hours to get therebut it is a really nice little park. It is concentrating at the moment on wildlife that either curently lives in the Scottish Highlands, or did at one time, though in the future it is expanding to include animals that live in mountain terrains from around the world. The highlight for mw was their small pack of wolves. The have a fairly large enclosure built on the side of the hill, with rocks and trees and they have a platform that goes out into the middle of the enclosure , so you can look down on the wolves and take photos without the fencing in the way. Here are a couple I took. These have both been cropped - I really must get myself a camera with a really long zoom!

And where else could you visit a wildlife park and have views like this:

Wolf portrait in soft pastels

I couldn't resist the temptation to get playing with my pastels today so started with a demo in the Society for All Artists magazine. The demo is by wildlife artist Vic Bearcroft and it's of a wolf. He called the image 'free spirit'. His version of it is here on his website: http://www.aboutface-art.co.uk/wildlife.htm It's under 'Wolves' and is the first one on display.

This is my version:
As you can see, not as good, but i'm still pleased with it, considering it must be 10 years since I last used pastels at school! I did mine on Ingres paper, instead of velour as the demo is on, purely because I have no velour paper. I found getting the fine detail with the black pastel hard work and I need some more colours. I did really enjoy it however, and will definitely be doing some more and it only took a couple of hours.