I Used to Draw Like This

I posted this on Facebook last week. My friend and framer Ljubica came over to deliver a picture and while chatting about art, this and that, I pulled out an old watercolour from high school.



It was good for a laugh! You can see that I liked Breyers as well as horses a lot back then! It made me a little sad too - even back then art programs were pretty underfunded. We did most of our projects on manila paper and it was almost always watercolour. Manila paper is a poor quality choice - it doesn't hold water very well - and, well, it's off white! Occasionally we did get real watercolour paper or a Fredrix canvas, but I was kind of disappointed by how little I learned about drawing, technique or materials. I sense this is why a lot of people never practice art - they figure that just because they were not good at it then, they never will be. Chances are they just didn't have good instruction or materials :)

Fawnette and Fancy Reflektion

I feel like my mind has really turned to mush! I was so sure I had blogged about this before, but apparently not. This is a commission that I finished earlier this year. It was started in summer 2011, but delayed due to the postal strike. It arrived at its destination last month and the commissioner is thrilled. Fawnette and Fancy are Arabians, although the picture is not as red as it seems. It was very difficult to photograph indoors.
January 5, 2012 ::: Golden Acrylic ::: 8x10"

Big yellow horse coming through!

Until spring rolls around, this is the best picture I can get. The distortion I was going for didn't quite happen, and the pose is almost more of an homage to Geroge Stubb's "Whistlejacket" but I'm quite pleased with how it turned out. Painting "loose" or "different" is not usually something I do :-)





Acrylic ::: 24x24" ::: December 29, 2009

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!