Horse Painting - Part Three - For Sale

Here we are!  Yay!  I love it!  As you can see, I did a lot of work on the shadows and muscles in his neck, which involved a lot of back and forth with the payne's grey, cobalt blue and titanium white.  NOW he's looking good!  I'm also loving the cool colors in his mane.  As you can see, I did pop in some pinks and warm tones for highlights to bring the attention to his face.  Everything about him makes me feel yummy now.

Let's look at a couple of close-ups.

 Here's the eye area.  Now you can focus in to see how I worked the layers.  I love seeing through the layers and noting how the colors change as they overlap each other.

You can also see how rough the area around the horse is.  I wanted to give it movement, as if he was swishing his head in determination.

Here's his entire head.  One of my favorite parts is the beautiful green over the blues.  They create a magic all their own.

All he needs now is a name and a good home.

$600.00 from my home (more when he gets to the Gallery).  30" x 30", heavy gallery-wrapped canvas.

You can always contact me here, or at my email address, colorcatstudios@gmail.com

Horse Painting, Part Two

Okay, here is my fine fellow as I've been adding some cobalt blue  As I'm working I'm looking at what I did on his neck and not liking it.  At all.  Okay, second stage.

 In the second picture I'm working out what colors I'm adding in to the mane.  Pinks, peaches yellows. 

I've added a lot of greens into the horse's face and absolutely loving it.  There's chemistry going on there.  Definitely.

But the mane is not working at all.  OUT!!


The third picture shows the new colors I've decided upon.  All cool colors - greens, blues and some yellow.  THIS I like!  I'm going with that!Looking at some of the shadows in the neck which I am NOT liking.  These are going to go.  The longest part of the mane laying on the neck I'm going to cover so it looks like shadows.  Look for part three and we'll see what happens.

Horse Painting, Part One

Working on a new painting.  One of my favorite parts of horses is their majestic necks.  So.... it was time to do one!  Following in my animal series, here we go again!  I had this big, square canvas which just seemed to be begging for a horse. 

Here we are in our early stages.  I forgot to take a photo of just the background, but had loosely laid out the horse shape and simply painted around it in a scratchy, drippy style.  It doesn't exactly fit the horse, but I wanted to do it this way to give it some tension and movement.  More about the background later.

Time for the horse.  I laid him down in Paynes Grey and a nice cobalt blue I recently picked up.

This is the time consuming part, making sure I've got the proportions right.  One of my pet peeves is paintings with incorrect proportions.

Proportions - check!

Then I pulled the loose background in to the horse to make up for any inconsistencies in my lay-down.  You can see it best in the way I treated the mane falling down in front of his face (surely he is a HE!).  I simply straightened out the proportions and left the white for the mane.

Like!

More later!

The Continuing Sage of the Artist's Desktop

Hello, Wonderful People,
Here I am again at my desk.NPR can have 'Tiny Desk Concerts,' I can have a 'Tiny Desk Musing.'

My desk is never clean.  Nor unused.  It's always covered with something, though when I finish one task I clean off all the supplies before beginning another.

This is my next job:

Here you see a board with color swatches that I'm working on for a commission for one of my clients.  This is for the background of a painting I'll be doing for them.  Once finished, I'll take it over and we'll see how it looks in the room with both the northern lighting and the colors they already have in place. 

It's going to be a lovely 7' x about 3' painting to go over their bed, and will feature a leaping ballerina!  I'm excited to get to that stage as I've already worked on a number of other ballerinas in preparation for this one.

It won't be long  before you see the good stuff...

Honoring Cecil the Lion

Honoring Cecil the Lion today with one of the paintings I created this summer.  An atrocity that never should have happened to that beautiful creature.

Ballerina in Gold, 'Life' Painting, Finished and For Sale

I just finished this one!  It's varnished and will soon be ready to sell. She's a dancer coming alive as she moves onstage.  It was a little hard to photograph because of the reflective gold, but if you could see it in person, the flesh tones and blush are coming to her face and working down her neck to her body.  I entitled it 'Life,' and really, really love her.

Right now I've got a commission for a similar painting, except that this one is 30" x 24" and that one will be, I forget right now, but about seven feet by four feet.  This beautiful dancer is destined for downtown.  Our daughter, Melody, whose business is Refine Arts, wrote, choreographed and directed an amazing show which she entitled 'Reconstructing Alice.'  It was so good that she was advised to take it downtown!

She has already rented a theatre, set the show dates, and is now taking audition signups.

Anyway, to synopsize, we found that the theatre has an exhibit hall for art, so we're going to hold a simultaneous dance and art show.  Excited!  This is one of the paintings I'm going to display down there.

Just today I had two people interested in purchase, so we'll see what happens with that. One found her on Facebook, and one came to our home.  When she saw her, it took her breath away.  It's difficult to explain my feelings when a painting that takes MY breath away has the same effect on someone else.

 Melody wants it to hang, so the sale will have to be conditional upon it hanging during her shows.  It's $800.00.  Let me know if you're interested.

I'll post a couple closeups of her in a few days. :)