Latest Project: Plough Horses

Yes, I've embarked upon another acrylic painting. Look, I only really have time to work on these during school holidays, weekends, and Wednesday evenings, so I haven't been resting on my laurels.

I enjoyed the last painting so much I decided to go horsey again, another 16x20 canvas board, but this time a pair of mighty plough horses. Here's the basic sketch onto canvas: - 

You might recall, if you've been following the blog for any great length of time, that I'm very much an amateur artist, and I've tended to paint like an amateur. One aspect of this is that I'm really not very disciplined. I'd go for the pleasure of painting the bits I enjoy most first, which in the case of a picture like this would be the horses. Well, following the last painting I've tried again to be a little more methodical, and so the immediate concern was to paint in the background:-

The sky is already quite nice considering that there's just the one layer of paint so far. It's a basic mixture of cerulean blue and white. The foliage is light green, mixed with white for the lighter patches. As for the ground, that's yellow ochre mixed with white. The much lighter patches are the same colour, but much diluted with water. The idea is that they will be painted over with some foliage. Here's where I ended yesterday's painting session after some more detailed work on the background:-

If you look at the patches of diluted yellow ochres and white, you'll notice that they are slightly duller and more brown now. I applied a very dilute layer of burnt umber. On the immediate right of the horses I've painted the rows of foliage, combining patches of light green lightened with white, pure light green, ad light green darkened with pthalo blue. This mixture of light green with pthalo blue is also what I used o darken the shadows on the trees in the background on extreme left and extreme right. One of the most noticeable additions in this last photo is the shadow beneath the horses. Also I've applied a dilute mixture of mars black and pthalo blue to the tail. 

It's taken I would say a good 4 hours to get to this stage