Plough Horses Project

In my last post I mentioned the plough horse painting. I spent maybe 3 more hours on it yesterday. This is where I stopped on Saturday, the day I started sketching it onto the canvas board:-

Considering how long it took me to make the harness racing painting, this was quite an achievement for one day's work.

Here's where the painting is at the moment: -

I did a fair bit more work on the background before starting on the first horse. You can see the sparse foliage to the left has been painted in. I've also darkened some of the areas of bare soil. The most obvious difference though is the work I've done on the horse on the left. I'm delighted with the head, but not yet finished with the lower legs - that blue grey is just the base and will be painted over during the next session which, all things being equal, should be today.

Racehorse pencil sketch

Been a while since I made a graphite sketch. I was taking a break from the plough horse painting and it struck me that I've made several larger acrylic paintings of horses, and one ink sketch during the challenge, but I've never done one in pencil. So I got my cheap small sketchbook, and an ordinary HB pencil and I made this sketch :-

New Project: Plough Horses

Yes, I've embarked upon another acrylic painting. Look, I only really have time to work on these during school holidays, so don't blame me too much for this. I'll soon be back in work and won't have time to do much other than ink sketches.

I enjoyed the last painting so much I decided to go horsey again, another 16x20 canvas board, but this time a pair of mighty plough horses. Here's the basic sketch onto canvas:-

Sketchbook Revival Is Back

If you've never tried out sketchbook revival you can do a lot worse than giving it a go. I did it last year, and enjoyed and found a lot of it very useful, and I'm signed up again for this year. If you want to learn more, then follow the link, and sign up. It's free, people!

Sketchbook Revival

Harness Racing Painting - finished

Sorry it's been a while. I've been without the internet for a week, so I just haven't been able to post. Still, it has at least allowed me to concentrate on finishing my latest acrylic. We left the painting here last time:-

You might recall that I was trying to do this painting 'properly' - that is, to not start painting in the horses until I'd finished the background . By this stage I'd go a nice effect with the trees, and found a green I could live with for the turf. So the next stage was to complete the horse in the foreground:-

I shan't lie to you, I do like painting horses very much. At first I wasn't sure that the colour combinations were quite right for this horse. but a combination of burnt ochre and burnt umber were actually pretty good. A little phalo blue added to my darkest raw umber gave me just what I was looking for for the shadows between the horse's forelegs. 

I do think that the horse which has been pretty much fully painted in by this photo is the most successful part of the whole painting. I used a similar combination of ochre and umber for the horse on the far right, although I went lighter just to distinguish it a little from the main horse. 

The horse to the immediate right of the main horse is a darker horse, and I'd started painting in one leg by this time, just to start to get an idea of the way that the different shades might interact with each other. However I did decide that I should probably paint in the jockey, the trap, and the horse and jockey on the extreme left before I concentrated on this horse.

The jockey is rather nicely painted, and he would come to stand out more once I painted in the darker horse behind him. The horse behind was darker anyway, and I thought that I would try to emphasise this. Looking at the next photograph I'm not entirely sure that this was the right way to go. Or rather, it is for the jockey in the foreground as it's very much brought out his head and upper body, but the horse behind is a but of a formless blob. Looking to the right you can see that I've applied a very watery base layer of a mixture of a little mars black, a little pthalo blue, a little china white and a lot of water.  

By the time I'd got this far the left hand side of the painting was pretty much completed. I'd done a little more work on the remaining horse, darkening some of the shadows on the rear leg. The idea when I was going to paint in the rest of the horse was to make it a mixture of blue-black, and dark browns as well. That was the idea, anyway.

Working left to right, I painted in the jockey and trap to the immediate right of the main horse. The dark horse to the right was going to prove to be a problem for me. Partly this was because of problems with the initial sketch. As I worked my way up the horse, applying paint to the head and neck, I came to realise that the head and neck were not proportioned correctly, so a lot of what I did before the next photograph was trying to correct this as best I could.

- and that's the finished painting. I did some more work trying to finesse the horse on the extreme right and extreme left, but that was it.

Doing your own 365 One Sketch A Day Challenge - a few tips

It’s not impossible that you may be thinking about embarking on our own 365 day one sketch a day challenge. If you are, then here’s my advice and tips, based on my own. 

·       Set out your round rules before you start. Obviously the big one is that you have to make at least one completed sketch every consecutive day of the year. But then there are other things to be considered. Does it have to be in a particular medium? Does it have to be from life or can you use a photographic reference? For me I allowed as broad an interpretation as possible, probably as a recognition that the challenge is hard enough as it is without narrowing the terms of your challenge.

·       Decide whether you are going to post your pictures online. Obviously I’m going to say that I think this is a good idea because I did it. But there may come times when you’ll need all the help you can get with motivation to complete your challenge, and having the need to post something online can help with this.

·       Think seriously about what you’re going to do on those days when you either can’t find the motivation, or the time to make the kind of sketch you’d like to make. As the great John Lennon said, “Life is what happens while you’re making other plans.” You might want to make sure that you always carry an emergency pen/pencil and piece of paper with you in case you’re stuck somewhere on business or whatever. Several of my sketches were made with a work biro on whatever scrap of paper I could find. On days such as this you have to get in the habit of actively looking for that ten minute window when you can make a sketch.

You might also want to think about what the simplest and quickest sketch you could make if all else fails would be like. I always told myself that if I had to I would allow myself to make a stick man sketch one day (only 1 day mind you). Thankfully I never had to, but if it had made the difference between keeping up the challenge, and failing on one day I would have done it.

One thing I didn’t do which might actually be helpful to you is to compile some prompts – maybe a couple of dozen, for you to use on days when inspiration fails.

·       Seriously consider joining a sketching group on Facebook. Sketching Every Day, which I joined in late July, provided me with a daily prompt (which I didn’t always follow, but was a great source of inspiration for sketches), another forum for displaying the sketches, and a source of encouragement and support.

·       There’s nothing intrinsically wrong about sticking with what you know and what you’re comfortable with. However you might like to think about using your challenge as an opportunity to push yourself out of your comfort zone, and try media that you’re not comfortable with, or which are totally new to you. I love using an ink sketching pen, and I think that it’s the medium I work best in. However I also produced sketches during the challenge using graphite pencil, biro, direct watercolour, acrylic, watercolour pencils and coloured pencils.

·       Keep an eye out for opportunities to tie your challenge into other challenges. The 30 day direct watercolour challenge took care of the month of June, for example, and Inktober took care of all bar a couple of days of October.

·       A year is a daunting amount of time. So although your overall goal is reach a year, do it by setting yourself medium term, and even short term targets. Start off by seeing if you can manage 7 days, just one week. When you’ve completed that, then set a new target of a fortnight. Then stretch it to a month. Once you’ve done a whole month, then you’re already 1/12 of the way there. Once you get to 37 days you’ve completed more than a tenth. Keep breaking it down into short achievable targets and you’ll hopefully find this helps you stay focused.

·       Don’t throw away the sketches you make. You might not love all of them, but each one represents a step on your journey and has its own value for that if for nothing else.

Acrylic Painting Project - Harness Racing

If you've read my previous two posts then you'll know that almost a fortnight ago I finished my last sketch to complete the one sketch a day challenge. One effect of this was that it has freed up my Wednesday evenings at art group. For the last few months I've been concentrating on making either plain ink or ink and watercolour sketches which I could complete in an evening to take care of that day's sketch. Now that I've done it, I decided that it was high time to start another acrylic painting.

What to paint, though? Well, thinking back over the last couple of years, when it comes to large acrylic paintings, my favourite subjects have been trams, trolleys and streetcars; steam locomotives and racehorses and working horses. Well, my last painting was a tram, and the one before that a steam engine. So it looked like another horse racing painting would fit the bill. This time, though, I decided to do something slightly different, by panting a harness racing subject.

Starting this one I promised myself that I was going to work patiently, by which I meant that I was going to sketch the design first onto the canvas, and not put one speck of paint down before this was finished. Then I was going to paint in the backgrounds, and then and only then was I going to allow myself to paint the bits I actually really enjoy - the horses and the jockeys.

So I spent all of Wednesday 27th's Artist's Group session in just sketching the design, and even then worked on it for another half hour last Saturday.

Taking so much time, the ironic thing is that if this was just a pencil sketch or an ink sketch of the same size I would have put a lot more detail and shading into it. The canvas is too big to be scanned, ad pencil on my canvases just doesn't photograph all that clearly, still hopefully it should give you the gist of what I've been doing.

Last Saturday, then, having completed the sketch I put down a layer of fairly strong yellow for the turf. This was always going to be painted over, but I was hoping that glimpses of the underlying yellow would come through in some areas. Then with the trees in the background I began applying dabs of light green , some of a slightly more watery consistency than the others. The idea was to paint in shadows and other colours of the leaves on top of this for the trees.

In this photo you can see the basic mottled effect in the top middle, while I've begun to paint in shadows and more variegation on the left hand side. I'd also begun to apply a mixture of olive green and titanium white on top of the yellow on the turf.

The above photo represents between 5 and 6 hours of work. I put in another hour's work before Wednesday completing the green layer on the turf. On the Wednesday I finished the trees in the background, and I wasn't at all unhappy with the effect. A judicious application of pthalo blue in some of the shadows and a watery application of burnt sienna in one area created the look I wanted, and drew some appreciative comments from other artists there. However, the other side of the coin was that my attempt to rectify the turf by adding a thin layer of creamy yellow to the top just made it far, far worse.

So on Thursday evening, I put in another hour and a half's work, applying layers of two slightly different lighter greens, one of which has a very appealing emerald tint. After about half an hour I started to think that this might actually work, and after another hour this morning I was a lot happier.

This one shows you the trees in the background now, and gives you a good idea about the different shades of green in the turf. I put in a bit more work on the turf, applying some subtle shadows and some scuff marks, and then, wonder of wonders, at least 10 hours after I began working on it, I finally started to paint a horse.

This is where I am currently. The neck and head of the horse in the foreground, which are mostly combined different shades of burnt umber and yellow ochre, which I've started painting still need some work, but it's a joy to do. I don't know if I'll get time to do anything more before Wednesday, but I'll post an update when I can.