52. Cow Pony II

8x10 oil/panel

Another purty horse today... Playing around with some warm/cool lighting options. For some reason, I just can't get a good photo of this today, sorry about the glare...

One of the things I always do is to photograph a painting and put it into grayscale, so I can judge whether the overall values are working.. is there enough light/dark contrast?  Does one value dominate, or are lights and darks too equally distributed?  Those are some of the questions I ask myself.  Here's this one in grayscale.

It is sometimes hard to judge colors for their value (Lightness or darkness).  Warm colors we tend to judge as lighter than they are, and cool colors as darker.  don't know me why, I just know it's true.  With this grayscale you can see that the very lightest thing in the painting is the white "sock" of the horse's front leg.  I would have guessed that the cowboy's hat was equally as light, but as you can see, it isn't!

So, I will probably let this set up a bit and do two things..

lighten the cowboy hat and lighten the sky. I knew that had to be done, but was waiting for it to get a little "tacky" before trying to touch that up.