Shaddy

Shaddy
16" x 20", acrylic on canvas
sold

The challenge of this painting was:

1. working from a shot where a section of the horse was obscured by a persons head.

2. while I drew countless horse pictures as a kid, I hadn't tried painting one.

3. a white(!) horse. How do you paint a white animal? 

 It turns out the fun thing about white/light colors is how other colors are reflected on it, if you look closely enough.

As in the last painting, I had to invent a background. The photo background had possibilities, but too many unfortunate tangents and distracting forms.
 I would have preferred more time to work this out- I would like to see a different textural element defining the ground- as it is, it's too similar to the texture of the body of the horse. The warm/cool patterns got a little too busy!  I would tone down the warm yellow reflection on the horses barrel, which would help push the body back in space.

 These foreshortened angles are still head-scratchers for me.

Cody

Cody
16" x 20", acrylic on canvas
sold

From a small cell phone shot. I did a preliminary study of this in a square format which I liked, but decided to use a landscape orientation canvas and include more body to offset the subject from being dead centered on the canvas. Although that would have been appropriate for a portrait.

 I had to ditch the Prussian Blue and Yellow Iron Oxide used at the start as they were just too saturated. The dog was beginning to glow in the dark. I switched over to the earth tones- Raw and Burnt Sienna, Ultramarine Blue and Naples Yellow. The background in the reference photo was an unusable interior scene.
Hitting a point of feeling "stuck", and with the panic deadline setting in, I tried something new- I submitted the painting on the dailypaintworks.com critique challenge, hoping for someone else's opinion besides my own. I received extremely helpful feedback, which helped me make some better decisions, and challenged me to come up with an unexpected background!

I learned a lot from working on this one.