Acrylic Project: Horse Race Painting

Yes, my friends, I enjoyed spending a proportion of the last two weekends making an acrylic painting so much, that I've started another one this week. Last time out I painted a Glasgow tram. Well, I don't want to saturate the market, as it were, so this time out I'm making another horse racing painting. 

It's a funny thing. I don't bet on horse races (apart from the Grand National - last time I had the winner was 1991). I don't watch horse racing. If I were to list my favourite sports, horse racing would, I'm sorry, be closer to the bottom than the top of the list. But I enjoy painting horse racing scenes. I'm not really sure why that should be. Still, I do enjoy painting horse races, and I've not done badly with these paintings over the years. I've sold every acrylic horse racing painting I've ever made, and was also commissioned to do a painting of Frankel the wonder horse too.

I was late starting this morning - so late, in fact, that it was just about the afternoon. I was sketching, you see. Still, when I put down the ink pens and picked up the pencil, I sketched the basic composition onto the canvas.

I set out to make the horses and the jockeys larger than in any painting I've made before. They aren't as big as I envisaged they would be, but I like the size they are oin this composition. 

Compared with other race paintings I've made , the background is pretty uncomplicated with this one - sky above, grass below, not a lot in between. So I made the decision to paint the base for the sky and the grass to begin.

Both sky and especially the grass will need a lot more painting before we're finished, but I was glad to get this down to start. 

One of the things which makes horse racing paintings fun to paint is the brightness of the jockeys' silks, and so this was what I really planned to concentrate on for pretty much the rest of this painting session.

One of the reasons for only putting on a very light coat of paint for both sky and ground is that when I start applying full, bold colour to the jockeys' silks, they really start to pop out from the canvas.

I got this far, and had to make the decision whether I was going to start on the horses. With the best will int he world, I wouldn't have finished them tonight, even if I rushed, so I decided to just paint the basic emerald green of the cloth beneath the saddles, and then leave it there for today. So this is how far we've got today:-

 We're at the stage here where I have to tell myself that it will look completely different once the Horses have been painted, and the after that, when the backgrounds have been properly painted in. When I start the next session I'll have a couple of decisions to make. Shall I go for the horses, or do more work on the background? I'm certainly planning to do the advertising boards and the railings, probably before I tackle the horses.