Painting Updated

Group of horses

Painting begun

This oil painting, here in its block in stage, measures 30 x 48 inches. It's based upon this drawing.

New Drawing in progress

This is the early stage of a larger, fancier drawing for which the previous ones have been practice and rehearsal.

New Drawing in progress

Two Horses

Two Horses

Four Horses

Four horses

To see two details of this drawing click here and here.

Three Horses

Four horses

With color

I added color to a drawing I posted previously.

Detail

To see the whole drawing click here.

Detail of a drawing

To see the whole drawing click here.

Three horses partly colored

New Drawings

I've been drawing horses the last couple days. And I'm adding them as I make new ones. But some of the best ones (so far) have already been posted earlier. So keep scrolling!

Two Horses and a Colt

This is not a "finished" drawing. It's the opposite of something finished. It was a very capricious and unstudied, purely fun kind of drawing. I drew it fast, I was very direct, I changed my mind alot, I erased, I drew overtop other parts of the drawing. It was a good vehicle for getting ideas.

Seen from the back

Bright colors

toy horses

When you are drawing toys, you can put them into naturalist settings -- try to make the toys resemble real horses by introducing a landscape of grass and sky. Or you can draw them as toys -- sitting on the table, among other objects, surrounded by very unlandscape-like colors. Or you can do something in between as here. I don't remember what was purple, but the band of color goes well with the one carefully drawn horse and its sketchy companion.

Compositional study

This is the drawing that will most likely form the basis of the painting that I'm planning to make. This drawing has been turned into a painting, an early version of which appears here.

Standing Horse

This, and all the horses posted prior, is drawn from a plastic toy. As I've been drawing I have tried to imagine a living horse and to imagine as well it's mood or personality. Most these drawings are made on 8 x 10 inches sheets of Strathmore drawing paper in a spiral notebook using pencil. A few earlier ones are colored using colored pencils.
I'm drawing the whole group to free up ideas for a painting that I have planned, which I'm designing for children particularly. Hence, I'm very comfortable drawing from toys, but even as I am looking at toys, I try to recapture every memory I have of being around real horses, memories which are quite few in number since I don't usually get a chance to see real horses much.
Of course, I cannot help thinking about Degas's horses also, which are almost as real and living (for me) as real horses are real and living.
I cut my teeth on Degas, when I was young and first learning how to draw. So, it's natural to turn to him now and to renew my acquaintance with his ideas, ideas that are as much ideas about lines and forms as about things.

Arbitrary colors

I like using colors to suggest forms, playing off the various contrasts of warm and cool. The colors don't have to be naturalistic. They can be decorative. Or they can have meaning that is suggested through decoration: they can be psychological.

seen from above

Of course when you are drawing a plastic horse, you are quite at your leisure to observe it from any angle that you wish. This is one of the benefits of drawing from models, and then if you have the chance of drawing a real horse -- even the opportunity of observing one from above, the odds of your being able to seize the moment are much better than if you never drew from a plastic model.
Artists like Degas, artists like the Renaissance old masters (for whom equestrian moments were not unusual events), all made use of statuary to learn the animals forms. Degas made sculptures as well as drawings, so as not only to have static models from which to draw, but to be shaping those models himself, to learn the forms very physically in the act of giving them tangible shape.
The grid of intersecting lines in this drawing comes from my loose inclusion of the tiles from the bathroom floor where the model horse was situated. While I didn't attempt it in this drawing, it introduces another potential framework: using the perspective of the floor to help master the complicated foreshortening from the angle of vision.