Harness Racing Painting

Sorry it's been a while. I've been without the internet for a week, so I just haven't been able to post. Still, it has at least allowed me to concentrate on finishing my latest acrylic. We left the painting here last time:-

You might recall that I was trying to do this painting 'properly' - that is, to not start painting in the horses until I'd finished the background . By this stage I'd go a nice effect with the trees, and found a green I could live with for the turf. So the next stage was to complete the horse in the foreground:-

I shan't lie to you, I do like painting horses very much. At first I wasn't sure that the colour combinations were quite right for this horse. but a combination of burnt ochre and burnt umber were actually pretty good. A little phalo blue added to my darkest raw umber gave me just what I was looking for for the shadows between the horse's forelegs. 

I do think that the horse which has been pretty much fully painted in by this photo is the most successful part of the whole painting. I used a similar combination of ochre and umber for the horse on the far right, although I went lighter just to distinguish it a little from the main horse. 

The horse to the immediate right of the main horse is a darker horse, and I'd started painting in one leg by this time, just to start to get an idea of the way that the different shades might interact with each other. However I did decide that I should probably paint in the jockey, the trap, and the horse and jockey on the extreme left before I concentrated on this horse.

The jockey is rather nicely painted, and he would come to stand out more once I painted in the darker horse behind him. The horse behind was darker anyway, and I thought that I would try to emphasise this. Looking at the next photograph I'm not entirely sure that this was the right way to go. Or rather, it is for the jockey in the foreground as it's very much brought out his head and upper body, but the horse behind is a but of a formless blob. Looking to the right you can see that I've applied a very watery base layer of a mixture of a little mars black, a little pthalo blue, a little china white and a lot of water.  

By the time I'd got this far the left hand side of the painting was pretty much completed. I'd done a little more work on the remaining horse, darkening some of the shadows on the rear leg. The idea when I was going to paint in the rest of the horse was to make it a mixture of blue-black, and dark browns as well. That was the idea, anyway.

Working left to right, I painted in the jockey and trap to the immediate right of the main horse. The dark horse to the right was going to prove to be a problem for me. Partly this was because of problems with the initial sketch. As I worked my way up the horse, applying paint to the head and neck, I came to realise that the head and neck were not proportioned correctly, so a lot of what I did before the next photograph was trying to correct this as best I could.

- and that's the finished painting. I did some more work trying to finesse the horse on the extreme right and extreme left, but that was it.