A buffalo is mostly mass. That is the first thing you notice trying to paint one — the animal is a shoulder and a head and a great deal of coat, and if you get the weight wrong nothing else you do will save it.
Pastel suits them for exactly that reason. The medium has texture built into it. Where oil wants to be smoothed, pastel stays granular, and a buffalo’s winter coat is nothing but grain — matted, dusty, catching light at the tips and swallowing it underneath.
Light on the plains
The other difficulty is the landscape they stand in. Open plains have almost no vertical reference — no trees to measure against, no buildings — so scale has to come entirely from the light and the horizon. DawnE tends to solve this by keeping the sky low and letting the animal break the line. It makes the buffalo read as large without needing anything beside it for comparison.
Why these animals, still
They were nearly gone. That fact sits underneath any painting of a buffalo whether the artist intends it or not, and it is probably why they keep getting painted — an animal that came back from the edge carries something a deer does not.
DawnE’s Buffalo Love takes a gentler angle on it: two animals rather than one, and closer to tenderness than to grandeur. It is a quieter painting than the subject usually gets.