My two little mares have their basic shape now. This was certainly a new challenge, since each lady was by herself in a separate photograph. Luckily for me, the lighting was similar, so they won’t look like they were stuck together from opposite sides of the earth. I made a composite image in Photoshop, cutting each horse out from its background, and then pasting them together over a new background. This enabled me to move them around at will until I got a size, a crop, and an arrangement I liked.
Then I printed out the Photoshop result, which I then divided into equal square portions marked off by little crosses. This makes a grid so I can more accurately transfer the small picture to the much larger canvas and get the proportions right. The canvas has grid marks on it too, which you can still see in the drawing because I haven’t erased them yet.
Next step will be ink, but not today! Drawing two horses on one canvas was just short of doing two different portraits, so it took me most of the day.