Just starting a watercolor of a gorgeous Quarter Horse in the show ring. One of the reasons I wanted to paint this is the light dappling in the horse’s coat.
There are a couple of ways to create the effect of a dappled hide. One is to lay down a fairly strong wash of color, wait until the wash is just losing the shine from the water, and sprinkle the area with salt. As the salt dries, it pulls water from the paper-and pulls color with it to create spots. Very effective, but it takes a long time to dry, and is messy.
For the impatient among us, there is the technique I used. After laying down a strong wash of color and waiting a few moments for the shine to fade, I grabbed a spray bottle of water. Holding it about 18″ from the paper, I barely squezzed the handle, causing the nozzle to “spit” random-sized drops of water onto the paper. The water repels the pigment, creating a similar effect to salt.
Above, the first background wash has been dropped in, and the details of the face begun. The eyes, muzzle and ears are always the first place I go on an animal portrait. This is off to a good start, but if something doesn’t develop well, I’ll abandon the painting and start over…
After about 2 hours of continuing to detail the head and body, the form is developing. I’ll work on the rider and tack now – need to see the relationship before I go any further with shadows.
Now that the rider has been roughed in, all of the light values (and many of the mid values) have been established. The final steps will be to give the rider and tack a bit more detail, and to add some dark values to “pop” the horse.
One problem I’ll need to resolve is the background: the arena and stands cut the painting nearly in half. The transition will need to be lowered a bit for a better visual…