Harness Racing Painting

So, taking up the story from my last post, almost a fortnight ago I finished my last sketch to complete the one sketch a day challenge. One effect of this was that it freed up my Wednesday evenings at art group. For the last few months I've been concentrating on making either plain ink or ink and watercolour sketches which I could complete in an evening to take care of that day's sketch. Now that I've done it, I decided that it was high time to start another acrylic painting.

What to paint, though? Well, thinking back over the last couple of years, when it comes to large acrylic paintings, my favourite subjects have been trams, trolleys and streetcars; steam locomotives and racehorses and working horses. Well, my last painting was a tram, and the one before that a steam engine. So it looked like another horse racing painting would fit the bill. This time, though, I decided to do something slightly different, by panting a harness racing subject.

Starting this one I promised myself that I was going to work patiently, by which I meant that I was going to sketch the design first onto the canvas, and not put one speck of paint down before this was finished. Then I was going to paint in the backgrounds, and then and only then was I going to allow myself to paint the bits I actually really enjoy - the horses and the jockeys.

So I spent all of Wednesday 27th's Artist's Group session in just sketching the design, and even then worked on it for another half hour last Saturday.

Taking so much time, the ironic thing is that if this was just a pencil sketch or an ink sketch of the same size I would have put a lot more detail and shading into it. The canvas is too big to be scanned, ad pencil on my canvases just doesn't photograph all that clearly, still hopefully it should give you the gist of what I've been doing.

Last Saturday, then, having completed the sketch I put down a layer of fairly strong yellow for the turf. This was always going to be painted over, but I was hoping that glimpses of the underlying yellow would come through in some areas. Then with the trees in the background I began applying dabs of light green , some of a slightly more watery consistency than the others. The idea was to paint in shadows and other colours of the leaves on top of this for the trees.

In this photo you can see the basic mottled effect in the top middle, while I've begun to paint in shadows and more variegation on the left hand side. I'd also begun to apply a mixture of olive green and titanium white on top of the yellow on the turf.

The above photo represents between 5 and 6 hours of work. I put in another hour's work before Wednesday completing the green layer on the turf. On the Wednesday I finished the trees in the background, and I wasn't at all unhappy with the effect. A judicious application of pthalo blue in some of the shadows and a watery application of burnt sienna in one area created the look I wanted, and drew some appreciative comments from other artists there. However, the other side of the coin was that my attempt to rectify the turf by adding a thin layer of creamy yellow to the top just made it far, far worse.

So on Thursday evening, I put in another hour and a half's work, applying layers of two slightly different lighter greens, one of which has a very appealing emerald tint. After about half an hour I started to think that this might actually work, and after another hour this morning I was a lot happier.

This one shows you the trees in the background now, and gives you a good idea about the different shades of green in the turf. I put in a bit more work on the turf, applying some subtle shadows and some scuff marks, and then, wonder of wonders, at least 10 hours after I began working on it, I finally started to paint a horse.

This is where I am currently. The neck and head of the horse in the foreground, which are mostly combined different shades of burnt umber and yellow ochre, which I've started painting still need some work, but it's a joy to do. I don't know if I'll get time to do anything more before Wednesday, but I'll post an update when I can.