Brian Zinchuk Publishing

It’s taken a lot longer than I had planned, but I was finally able to deliver the two largest canvases I have produced to date. Originally this was going to be one 8 foot by 2 foot canvas, but I eventually ended up making two 8 foot by 3 foot canvases, one highlighting Panther Drilling’s four rigs, and the second highlighting the men and the work that they do.

I had done several concepts a long time ago, but they weren’t so sure about them, and honestly, that was probably a good thing, because revisiting the whole project from a blank page ended up in a much better product.

The rig canvas was the biggest challenge – the four rigs were shot over the fall, before the snow, and winter, with entirely different lighting and weather conditions. How could I make it all work?

Finally I came up with the idea of one side being the fall, and then transitioning to winter. Rig 4, on the left, would provide much of the working material, and then Rig 3 and 2 would be painstakingly cut out and pasted onto the blue sky. Since I had to do Rig 3 twice, it ended up being about 10 hours of editing. That included going pixel by pixel through every wire and brace on the derrick, cutting away the white sky that it was shot against.

All of these photos figured prominently in the Panther album I did in time for the 2013 Weyburn Oil Show.

The canvases were a challenge to stretch, which has me strongly leaning towards a specialized 120 inch stretching machine in the near future.

Delivery meant using the ENTIRE back of my recently acquired Ford Expedition, with all the seats folded flat. I had built a special crate for such deliveries, but the SUV worked out well.

Printing canvases of this size turned out to be a proof-of-concept for another, even bigger, project I am working on. Details should be out in the coming months.

Panther was very patient in waiting for the delivery of these pieces, and they look amazing in their recently re-finished office.

As Panther’s office manager Nikki said, “It looks like a drilling company office now.”