Anatomy Practice: Horses - 2

Might as well post like this. Just pretend that the bad iPhone photos are scans, okay? My iPhone doesn't rotate images when you take landscape pictures and I have no idea why, so here's three really bad pictures instead of a nice clean scan. Anyway.

I used one of my million horse books as reference for these. The first one is the first time I've bothered to try and add a rider/tack. The horse's legs and neck look too short and the head looks too small (to me anyway) but yay half-rider.

The second one is the first time I've drawn a horse jumping, but I didn't really have space to add the rider properly so I just did lines. The reference was TINY, probably less than one inch across, so I was more interested in just getting a general outline done.

The third one is the first time I've drawn a full horse without it being completely side-on. There's a bit of actual 3D going on there, but I didn't draw the fence in and ended up not drawing the front legs as high as in the reference. Oh well. I also couldn't get the head right to save my life.

The fourth was just me cheating because I couldn't find a full-body one to draw that I thought would fit the space. I still can't draw in bone structure etc in my sketches and they're still ending up as just outlines, which isn't going to be as helpful when I'm colouring. There's an art to proper lines when drawing and I'm nowhere near it. I enjoyed doing these though. I'm hoping to take a lot of photos of my model horses soon to aid me in drawing from different angles (they're very anatomically correct so it should be fine), but now I don't have a laptop I won't be able to see the photos for a while anyway. Grr.

Starting with watercolours.

I figured that if I tried to improve with so many mediums at once I'd end up not improving with any of them, so I decided to focus on painting with watercolours. I bought more paper in different sizes, a lot of paint - far more than I need at the moment, I must admit - and a selection of tutorial books. So far, so good. I bought small pads of paper and small paint boxes in the hope that this would reduce how much time it'd take to set up, paint and then clean up, so I'd be able to do it more often. In theory.

I had some paper left over from when I made messes as a kid, so I'm using that up first. I figured I could do four paintings on the first two sheets, two on the third sheet and one larger one on the final sheet. So, here's the first sheet of four:

I'm not scanning them individually because I don't think they deserve it. I've fondly dubbed them "watercolour disasters". The numbers on the first three are page numbers from the books I got the references from - all three of them are DK encyclopaedias/handbooks. The fourth was painted without a reference (hence the scrawl next to it).

To paint them, I used the smallest paint set that I had - a Winsor & Newton Cotman one - and a little water bottle/tray that I got with a watercolour pencil set from WHSmith years and years ago. I took photos of them with a ruler so you can see how big they aren't. The water bottle is quite awkward to fill up but the tray is the perfect size for the paint set. I can get two little paintings out of it without needing to change the water. The photo of the paints was taken after all four paintings were done and I haven't used them for anything else. I'm not sure how well they've held up.

The first one taught me that watercolours like to do whatever they want, and it's not my place to interfere. It looked absolutely fine until I tried to overwork it. Lesson learned, sort of. From starting the drawing to finishing the painting it only took about fifteen minutes, so I didn't waste too much of my time.

For the second I used masking fluid for the first time to do the green around the flower. The paper didn't like the masking fluid very much and sort of fell apart in places. I expected that because the paper is quite old and I have no idea what I'm doing. While working, the green outline looked quite like the blue in number three - vibrant. When it dried it became kinda invisible. This one went wrong really quickly. It was taking a lot longer than I could be bothered to spend on it and when I realised it'd be another disaster anyway, I just rushed the rest so I could move on.

The third one is a disabled goldfish. I forgot to draw the little side fins and I did the blue first, so by the time I realised that I'd given the poor thing a handicap, it was too late to do anything about it. Like the bird, this was done in about fifteen minutes, including drawing. I used masking fluid for the blue again, but the fish still ended up with a blue smudge on it. Still, I like masking fluid. It adds a lot to the time spent working though. And it smells horrible.

The fourth one was done without reference. The field needs to be darker because it looks like it's on the same level as the hill, and I have no idea what happened to that roof. It had colour on it, and then when it dried there was this colour-free circle. I couldn't be bothered to fix it.

Onto the next sheet of disasters! I think for the next four I'll do a horse, another flower (just because that was SUCH a disaster), a butterfly and maybe something more human. My acrylics and oils (I finally got some oils, by the way) are going to have to wait until I get better with these :)

This was a scheduled post - I am busy with university. Back soon! :)

Tulip

Program: Corel Painter X
Brushes: Detail oil brush (colour), Soft blender stump (blending)
Reference: My photograph

A year already! The last painting for my mother was the first digital painting I ever finished. A whole year has gone by and now ... this is the second digital painting I've ever finished. I really need to sort my tablet out. As with the last painting, this was made a print and sent to my mother for her birthday last month.

I painted it the same way as the previous one, but I worked a lot faster: this was started and finished in one night. I was annoyed at the lack of detail that it has - partly because I didn't have time and partly because my tablet just refuses to let me do things like that at the moment - but at the same time I can still see improvements from the previous piece. The blending is much better, for a start. Although the other painting is more detailed, it isn't blended as well. Tulips are more detailed to look at than daffodils anyway though, so I'm not sure if that's a fair comparison. My favourite part of the painting is the new signature, hah. I'm hoping to get more digital pieces finished this summer.

This was a scheduled post - I am busy with university. Back soon! :)

Two equine WIPs.

EDIT: WIPs both look really pixelated, they aren't like that normally. Odd.

Two things I've been trying to work on. One is a painting from a screenshot of A Knight's Tale (I love that movie) and I started it a month or so ago, and the other is my attempt at painting a horse sim of mine from The Sims 3.

There's still a lot of work to do on the face, armour and bridle ... plus I need to quickly throw a background together. Most of the work I've done is on the eye and I don't think that's finished either. Painting a close-up image when I have a broken tablet was a horrible idea.

This is Sandy the simhorse. He's a Welsh Cob stallion with very weird colouring - I have no idea what to call his colour. Been a while since I bothered studying horses properly. It's pretty either way, and dappled (which I probably won't even try). Here's a screencap of him stuffing his face. It's dusk here but you can kinda see his colouring.

The painting is from a screencap as well. It's a really cute one of my simcat staring up at him. I'm not sure if I'll paint just Sandy or the cat as well because it's kinda tiny as it is. I'm making the image larger as I go so the end result will be decently sized, but while I'm working on basics it's not a giant image to work on. I prefer getting basics down on a smaller canvas so I can just sketch and scribble. At the moment it's been doubled in size once already and the WIP here is the current size.

Plenty more WIPs to come, nothing finished I'm afraid. Current work in progress is another painting for my mom and my blog isn't allowed pictures of that because she checks it. I'll try to get some more things up soon.