College Work

As promised, I didn't wait too long to post again! Here is today's work. This is one of my college pieces and as such is more of a practice than an actual portrait. The brief was to paint a close up portrait of a horses head and bridle, in any medium, to accurately portray the bridle and the shadows it casts upon the horse. I decided to do oils because it's the medium I'd most like to master and I'm sure Mel can offer me lots of help.

I found a free reference photo online and started work before Christmas. I've blocked in the main colours of the horse, some more refining is needed before I can start detailing though. Tomorrow I''m going to finish off the basic parts of the bridle and to try and blend the horse into the black background somewhat.

I'm not entirely happy, the canvas quality isn't great and it shows, this photo that I have taken isn't the best either. In fact, it looks pretty ugly at this stage. But that is what the course is all about, I can't expect to master something straight away, it will be great to get feedback once it's completed.

Catch Up Post

Oh dear, it's been ages since I last updated here. Truth be told though, I haven't been doing much regarding art over the past month anyway. I've been travelling to Scotland, then Romania to visit mine and my other half's parents, and it was generally a busy month!

I've decided to focus more on my college work, and I'm currently working on an oil portrait of a horse that will be given in for assessment. I have two more pieces to do to complete my set of work to hand in, and I need to do a big art shop tonight on GreatArt. They gave me a 10%discount code when it was my birthday in December and I can still use it up until the end of this month so I should hopefully get a decent bit off! Once my new supplies have arrived I'll be getting on with the college pieces.

In other news, I decided to get this piece finished so I can concentrate more on my studies.


The reference photo is by http://furlined.deviantart.com/ and I'm hoping to use another of his stock images for one of my next college assignments.

I've also been given permission by one of my other half's work colleagues, to paint any of his huge collection of animal photographs, which is a massive treat! He has a wide variety of animals and birds to choose from, all of an excellent quality and he's given me free reign to use as many as I want, he will also link from his Flickr page to my website and any other places I post the paintings. I'm thinking of giving him prints of the works in exchange for his generosity.

In addition I'm going to be updating the website with new, seperate galleries for all mediums, adding a sale page which will have prints, originals and vouchers for sale, and also I will be offering oil paints for commissions instead of acrylics.

So once my diploma pieces are done I'm hoping to have a lot of new exciting originals on the go. I'll sporadically post my diploma pieces here, if I think they are worthy of being shown, for now, I'm gathering a list of galleries to contact about some of my current originals, then it's time to take Zac for a lovely long walk. Hopefully it won't be too long before I'm posting here again!