Watercolour Challenge: 21 - 23

21) Ginger Tom

22) High hurdler

23) World War I tank in monochrome blue

Finished - Horse racing painting

Finally, after probably close to 18 hours work, I finished my latest horse racing painting in the Artists’ group last night. Here it is: -

Racing from Newmarket

I didn’t do a huge amount last night. There was more work to do on putting in the crowd on the far right of the picture, although I didn’t really want to do much more than suggest a less than capacity crowd. Above them I wanted to put in some detail of the main stand. Then, after adding some mottling to the turf I was rapidly getting to the stage where you have to ask yourself whether it’s time to stop before you end up overworking the whole thing. I did a wee bit more work on the roof of the stand, and then signed it in the corner. Done.

Racehorse - getting closer

Here's the stages so far: -

That's after 14 hours. Now, I spent almost two more hours last night working on the painting in Artists' Group last night.

Give yourself a moment or two to spot exactly where the best part of two hours work has been put in. Got it? Well, I've done quite a bit of work on the fence between the grass and the grandstand. Then I've extended the crow a little further as well. Did you notice that I've put more shadows and definition on the turf itself? Now, be honest, did you notice the other horse's leg which I added poking into the extreme left of the picture? I also did a little work on the roof of the grandstand too.

It looks quite close to being finished, but that's a bit deceptive. The work I have left to do is on the rest of the crod, and also the grass, and that's fiddly, pernickety work, which is not that enjoyable to do, but essential to the final look of the painting.

Racehorse latest

I spent a couple of hours on this at Artists' Group last night: -

These paintings show the progress so far, and this next shows what I did last night

After 14 hours

I did more work on the sky and the roofline of the grandstand. I began putting the crow into the grandstand, and did more work in the fencing. Also I painted in some of the shadows on the grass beneath the horses. It's getting there, but I feel that there's still several hours of work in there.

Racehorse Project

I'm still quite a long way from finishing the horse racing acrylic painting I started working on at the start of January. Last time I posted about it, it looked like this: -

This was after about 5 hours of work - 2 in the Artists' Group and 3 at home. Well, I decided that I'm going to take my time and not rush this one. As it was I had the sketchcrawl last Saturday, but then today I made a conscious decision not to work on it today. So since then I've spent 4 hours on it during two Artists' Group sessions. Here's where we are now: -

There's just a little bit of work to do on the two horses and jockeys on the far left. However, the crowd is going to take hours. Thankfully I got good experience of painting a crowd in my Frankel picture, so I know I can do it as long as I have the patience for it.

New Project: Racehorse

You may remember that I painted a couple of racehorses last year, which led to me being commissioned to make a painting of Frankel. Well, I sold both of those paintings last week.

Now, we began back at the Afan Nedd Artists' Group on Wednesday evening. I didn't have a project to work on, and so I decided it might be worthwhile starting another horse picture, and why not another racehorse? So I sketched out the horse and jockey for this one, and I'd painted in the jockey by the end of the evening. I spent a couple more hours on it today, and this is the state of play as it stands: -

I'm no unhappy with the way it's going so far. My previous favourite was my Frankel painting, but even with that painting I did think that the jockey could have stood out a little more. I'm very happy with the jockey on this one.

Horse Painting take 2: National Hunt

I started this at Artists' Group last week, and finished it this afternoon: -