I’ve finished the next installment of my desert stallion series, titled “Dawn. Since my experiment with a watercolor wash turned out so well on the last painting “Mid-Day,” I decided to try the same thing again with a slight variation. This time, I used blue, orange, yellow and red watercolor pencils to block in large areas of color. Then I used a wet brush to blend the strokes of color on the paper. My original intention was to have the red area be the sand that the horse would be standing on. Unfortunately, I forgot and drew the horse standing on the blue area instead. Whoops! But I decided to make the best of a bad situation and instead look upon it as a challenge: creating a warm sand over blue and a cool morning sky over red and yellow.
Here I’ve begun really working on the sky. I decided that a purely blue sky simply wouldn’t work. Teal and aqua look better over yellow and deep ultramarines and purples work better with red than straight blue would. To my surprise, the warm colors underneath added instead of detracted from the scene. The sky began to look colorful and alive.
The blue turned out to work well as the base for the sand, much more so than I thought. I used more browns and creams and the sand looked cool, unheated by the light of day, just as it should in the early morning.
Now I had my basic ideas in place. Time to touch up. All through this I had been working periodically on the stallion, first using soft pastels in creams, peaches and browns. Now I took my hard pastel pencils and began adding layers of color and shadow. I even used some aqua to tie the foreground elements with the sky.
And here’s the finished product. For something that looked like it was going to be a disaster, it turned out well.
Here are close ups of the stallion. Arabians technically are not palominos, but I can dream, can’t I? :-) Palomino is my favorite horse color.
