Tis the Season

I’m back from New York and working hard on the several handmade gifts I’m doing this year. I usually do a mix of homemade and bought gifts, depending on time, ideas, and general motivation. One thing I’m making this year is a portrait of my friend Liddy’s new horse, Violet.

Just before I left for Thanksgiving, the model was starting to move from the awkward early pastel layers to at least the vicinity of realism. She has a ways to go, but I’m feeling confident that I’ll have her done in time for Christmas.

Here’s Violet after about 5 layers of pastel:

At this point I was having trouble visualizing her because of the white primer mane and tail, so I switched from pastels to acrylics for a bit. I always find that useful for the final pastel stages because it helps me see where how the colors will look on the finished horse.

Ah, she’s starting to look like Violet now! Here she is with a few more layers in both media:

I’m pretty pleased with how she’s turning out. She’s a gorgeous horse, and while I know I can’t do her color justice I at least want to achieve a resemblance of her beautiful coat. I think I’m getting there- she needs a number of layers in both pastel and acrylic, but I’m relieved to have her looking at least vaguely Violet-like by early December. Hopefully by the end of this weekend she’ll be even closer to done.

Fuzzy Pony Progress

One of the projects I’m hoping to finish before my September live shows is this fuzzy little pony. You may remember him from back when he was a bunch of pieces, but he’s whole and horse shaped now!

After I sculpted his feathers, I decided I wanted him to be hairy overall so I sculpted hair on his chin and belly and used messo to make hair patterns over the rest of his body.

The only problem with hair texture is that it’s hard to get pastels to color every bit. So I always put down a layer or two of acrylic to get into all the crevices. Since this pony is going to be a sun-faded black, I used a brown acrylic for his base.

After the first layer of acrylic I found some places I wanted to re-texture, hence the white on his barrel.

He was looking pretty stark and scary at first, but now with some layers of pastel his color is starting to come along. And I’m very pleased with his fuzzy look!

Dots and Spots

I finally got some paint out yesterday and put some color on two of my prepped horses. It was really fun to have a brush in hand again!

This spotty fellow is a commission/trade. He is an absolute blast to paint.

Here he has one layer in acrylics and one in black pastel. Next I’ll start working on making his white a more realistic off-white horse color instead of the stark hue of the primer. That will dull down and “push back” a lot of the spots and roaning I’ve put on in the first layer, but hopefully that will give a nice depth to his color. And I’ll go back in nearer the end and darken the spots and reroan as desired. Working on his little hairs makes me really eager for my upcoming strawberry roan.

This guy is looking a little scary at the moment, but that strange mane and tail was just to give me something to see instead of white as I paint his body color in.

Many people, myself included, will do a pinto by finishing a complete solid paint job and then layering the white markings over. In this case, because the horse has so much white (his other side is nearly completely white) I’m only pastelling the chestnut color into the specific places I marked out in acrylic. That way I won’t be wasting time, energy, or materials on a bunch of coloring and shading that will just be painted over.

I used a really light layer of a base color to mark the spots (it’s much lighter in person) so that it will barely influence the final color more than plain white. After the spots are their finished color, I’ll redo his white in a nice off white horse color and add the appropriate shading. I hope he’ll end up as cute as my reference pictures!

Visualizing Colors

I ran across an awesome idea from Karen Grigson of Bluebird Studio in a Blab thread recently. The subject was shading and tones on a white horse, and she posted this cool visualization from the reference picture:

What a brilliant idea! And it’s not just for those difficult white/off-white tones, either. She also posted these:

Seriously, this is so brilliant. And widely relevant too- no matter your medium of choice, these easy color palettes are extremely useful! I can’t wait to get back into finish work and use this technique.

If you don’t have a program that can take color swatches like this, there are several free downloadable ones. Karen mentions Paint.net (downloadable at getpaint.net) which runs on Windows/Vista. If you’re using a Mac, never fear, GIMP is a free, open-source photo editor for Mac.

Karen Grigson is not just a talented (and helpful!) painter, but also an excellent and creative sculptor. She did an awesome post on her blog called Character that has some great tips on facial customizing.

It is super awesome how open and helpful hobbyists are!

Random Pastel Tips #3,046-7

I am a pastelling maaachine. I realized that I have to be if I hope to get these guys done in three weeks. I even managed to catch a dry moment to get some primer on Troy Soldier so I’ll be able to start pastelling him soon.

Meanwhile, I’m trying to do one or even two pastel layers on Kettil and Liam every day. Speed can result in carelessness, however, so I need to take precautions so I don’t make mistakes that become major set backs.

With these models I’m working with two drastically different set of colors. My reference horses are pretty much as far apart in color as can be:

So I need to make sure that I’m keeping the dust from Liam’s dark bay off of the light buttery dun of Kettil. To do this, I always work light to dark. That means that Kettil gets his pastel layer first, and is then set him aside. If I went the other way, the red-brown dust from Liam that falls on my gloves would easily be mashed into Kettil and ruin that layer.

Strategy number two is to label my brushes. I’ve got one nice soft pastel brush for Kettil’s light dusky colors, and another set aside for Liam’s reds, browns, and blacks. Even when you wash brushes carefully, pastel dust and stain can stay in the little crannies and could come out to attack later. If you have a brush that is stained black, do not try to use it on your isabella palomino!

The color I’m using on Liam will change from this red-violet to a much darker brown black, but I can use the same brush because a.) I will wash it and b.) that red tint is still a part of his coat color, even if the primary colors I’ll be using later are darker. A tiny bit of red mixed in his later layers won’t hurt him, and might even add luster.

Better wrap this up- I’m on a strict schedule here!