Plough Horse update

Here's where I am now: -

Very pleased with the way this one is coming. This is 4 days' work, probably with an average of 4 hours work each of those days.

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.