Winter Art

I've sold a few pieces since I announced in Nov. that I was going to begin selling my art.  This portrait was purchased by my friend for her mother.  It's her horse Rawhide, who I had here in training last summer.

This one is a study of Miles' eye.  I feel like eyes are difficult to do, so I've been drawing many of them to try and get myself to see just the shades of grey, not cognitively recognize it as an "eye".

This one is Billy, one of my most favorite quarter horses.

An old friend of mine from WA has a cute tricolored corgi named Simon, and she commissioned a portrait of him which I mailed out this week.

This is a drawing of Highboy that I did in about an hour.  I'm finding that he is difficult to draw because I know him so well.  I find that I see "Highboy", instead of seeing light, dark, and shades in between.  As a result I end up drawing him often, trying to get it just right.

Today I worked on my first mule, and I thought to take some photos of the process:

First I draw a grid onto my reference photo, and a proportionately sized grid onto my paper, which in this case was 2' x 3'.  After the grids are there, I draw an outline of whatever the subject is.

Next I add some scribbles to designate dark areas.  I fill in the darkest parts first with a conte crayon since it's the blackest thing I've found.  If it's a horse I always do the eyes second to last, and tack (if it's there) very last because those parts are the most detailed.

Then I continue filling in the other parts of the drawing, making the dark parts as dark as I can.  The lightest parts I do with pencil, and the medium shades I do in charcoal since it covers large areas pretty easily.  I use graphite pencils for the really detailed parts, and a blending stick if I'm trying to get the drawing really close to photo accuracy and don't want pencil lines.

The results are pretty cool!  I still can't believe I can do this - I'm so grateful for this perk to brain damage.