And it is done...

I put the final tweaks on my yellow horse painting this morning and when it's light enough, I'll photograph it tomorrow. It felt so good to mark it down as complete today in my sketchbook.

A few people have seen it in progress, and it's not a very complicated painting. The complications came from the horse's legs (which I'm still not entirely satisfied with) and the green colour field. The original green colour more or less cancelled out the darkness of the horse's legs, and it needed to be pushed back. It really killed me on Sunday to paint out the whole area including the horse's legs. Then I discovered that the distortion I was going for was part of the problem with the legs - I ended up mixing some light blue to slim down the rump. I spent all day painting on Sunday and I found myself mentally exhausted just from the sheer amount of thinking and problem solving required.

Monday was far easier - I touched up some areas and then gave myself some time to think about it. The colours I chose were based on Franz Marc's colour theories - some of you may recall that I wrote an art history essay on one of his paintings and this was inspired by it. He called yellow the "feminine principle" and I discovered it's very, very hard to paint around yellow, nevermind mixing up the purest shade of it. There are some areas where the colours vibrate against each other and I like that effect.

Hopefully by tomorrow I'll think of a catchy name for it. My husband suggested "Horse Dodging Laser Beams" and then threw in a few sound effects to boot!