I love trying to paint portrait horses (or in this case semi-portrait horses), but Jewel was one of the cases where it took me a dozen tries to get the color just right.

You wouldn’t know it to look at the photos, but this little gal has an awful lot of browns in her mix! While it makes her a beauty in person, it certainly put up a fight when it came to my camera…

So apologies in advance for the Evil Black Dots and my inability to get the focus to work properly. You’ll have to squint a bit and imagine the awesome. *sighs*

(You can see more in progress photos and commentary on her facebook album.)

Now onwards, to the story of The Thousand  Shades of Brown!

Art Imitating Life

Since I had pretty good luck when it came time to color match with Vincent and Dandy, I decide to use the ‘grab color swatches using PaintShop Pro’ method. Then I sat down and tried to find mixtures of the various acrylics that came closest to the colors.

I freely admit that I’m still a novice when it comes to getting the color on the horse to match the color in the photographs, but I’m a long way from where I started and all bays were just shades of Burnt Sienna. 😉

I’ve gotten a lot better at documenting which colors I’m using in the art book. It won’t guarantee I’ll ever be able to recreate a paint job, but at least I’ll have some idea what I did. There’s nothing more frustrating than picking up an old work-in-progress and realizing I have no idea how to continue!

I used FolkArt 2907 Bark Brown and 944 Nutmeg as the base body color and expanded from there. The leg points were a mixture of dark gray and brown and there was a solid shading with pastels to bring the whole horse together.

I have a feeling I used some Prismacolor pencils on the hooves, since that’s been my default ever since I did the tutorial post, but I didn’t have them in my notes.

She might have been a challenge, but Jewel was still a blast to paint and I’m glad her owner was happy how she turned out! 🙂

Medium: Liquitex Artist Color Acrylics (Gesso, Ivory Black, Burnt Umber), FolkArt Acrylics (2907 Bark Brown, 944 Nutmeg, 420, Linen, 476 Asphaltum, 425 Medium Gray, 2906 Coffee Latte), Apple Barrel Acrylics (20258 Melted Chocolate), Sargent Art Chalk Pastels (Earthtones)