First pass–reminds me of a coloring book

ink version

first color pass

I think the hot weather has contributed to an overwhelming feeling of ennui that has engulfed me for the past couple of weeks. It certainly kept me from working on this painting as quickly as I would have liked. The ink portion probably could have been finished quite a bit earlier except for the fact that one of the horses is black. Which means a lot of cross-hatching and a lot of time. The first pass of color has left me smiling, recalling the coloring books of my childhood. I wasn’t a very creative kid in the coloring book department. I always filled in the lines as accurately as I could, and never used shading or multiple colors within any boundary lines…unlike my free spirit playmates who would scribble all over the design and use whatever color happened to land in their little fists. I guess this first pass shows that some things never change! Not to worry though–the next passes (and there will be many in order to get that now gray-looking horse really black) will develop depth of color and shading. The other oddity of this painting is that I am developing foreground and background simultaneously. I usually do the horse and the background separately, mostly because I like to make up the background to complement the horse and I need to wait and see how the horse is going to turn out in order to do that. But since I previously made up this composition on my computer from three different photos, I already have a good idea of what it’s supposed to look like. So I will develop the whole thing at once, like I do with most of my landscapes and building paintings.