Above Jemez Springs, 5x7 oil/panel
Well, today is another effort to combine the daily painting exercises with a more complete work. I have to do this because of time constraints. I worked hard to make purposeful brush strokes - the horse started out as just a thin wash of shadow color all over, and then came back later and painted thickly where the light would hit. A tiny bit of reflected light on him, and that's it. If you click on the photo and view the enlarged view, you can see there's a good bit of impasto. You can probably also see I really need new brushes!
The original plan was to have the foreground figure against a very muted, very pale,background. However, when i started working on a white horse against the light background, there just wasn't enough value contrast.
So the background got a bit darker. I'm thinking I might go back in and re-state it REALLY light, but for today, the allotted time had passed, and I needed to get on to other things...
Though the horse and rider are mostly from a photo reference, the landscape is real.. it is on top of one of the mesas above our little village of Jemez Springs... That's our winter training ground because while we might be buried in snow up here, it's usually not..
2 comments:
Love the brushstrokes on this; that's my biggest problem, getting the values separate enough. So I try to make my strokes purposeful, but then have to go over them to fix them- there goes any freshness!
Are you sticking strictly with large brushes- what size- for this small work?
I've been using a #6 flat - Silver brush bristle. It's pretty big for these. As long as a brush has at least a good sharp edge, I can use it, but all of 'em are going fuzzy on me... arrrgggghhhh!
Have you ever tried pre-mixing colors? I don't usually, and for landscapes, seems it might be tough, but for small objects, it might work... that way the observing and deciding is before you put down any paint.
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