Lots of New Stuff Today

While I've been waiting for things to dry and detailing other pieces, I spent some time starting a few pieces. It felt good to be able to touch every single one of the sales pieces that I have planned for this year.

But first up is this Mercurio, who is coming along much more quickly than I had expected. Good news since I've had this guy for far too long. I still have work to do on him, but this photo illustrates my favorite point in a paintjob: when I can see everything starting to come together and I know that the end is in sight. It can feel really daunting to spend several months on one piece, to the point where I wonder if I'll ever finish, but when I get to this point it literally feels like a weight lifts off of me and I feel a surge of confidence because I know I can do it now.

And this is probably my second favorite point in a paintjob, where I have finished prepping and have just started to add color. It looks horrible, pretty much unrecognizable to the finished product, but it's here where I can let my imagination go and just have fun and not worry about anything. I actually started painting this guy but then I felt that he was a little too tight on his base, so I've been loosening the holes a little bit so it's not so hard to stick him on the base.

Taboo has another layer of acrylics painted on him, not sure how much farther 'll go with that before I switch over to oils.

Here's the Sushi that is going to be a fleabit grey. I am very nervous about doing this color and I'm really not sure how I'm going to go about it. I will probably do a combination of colored pencil and tiny brushwork, among other things.

I sure love this sculpture, I can't wait to get more color on him.

This Nevada is going to be a dun pinto. You can see how poor my airbrush skills are in this photo. I originally painted a light pangare color, but clumsily covered it all up with the body color. So I don't know whether airbrushing actually saves me time or not, since I'll have to fix that.

I have a really cool chestnut color picked out for Mindy, I hope I can pull it off! It won't look anything like this, I can tell you that much.

Vixen is going to be an appy. This is two layers of acrylic hand painting.

Imp will be a black blanket appy. It's kind of an extended blanket.
That's it for now. I'll be continuing the detailing of my current commission pieces, as well as putting more color on the Rose Reiner and the bay Sushi.

Update

Okay, back to blogging! I've been spending lots of time on the dappling for Alvaro and Mercurio, as well as detailing on the Paige Patty reiner, but I still want to wait before showing them again. I thought I would show a couple of detail shots of the dapples. Mercurio is more of a sooty buckskin color and Alvaro has more caramel tones. I'd say I'm about 85% done on Avaro and the reiner, and probably 65% on Mercurio. When I get down to the more detailed parts of any painting I slow down considerably, to the point where it sometimes feels like I'm making no progress.

Hmm, what else? Here's a (blurry) shot of all the mini sales pieces I plan on painting this year. I really want to be able to finish all of these this year.

And here is a new oil paint that I tried out that I really like:

It's called "Modigliani ochre" and is a really nice dull flesh-like color. It's a mix of red iron oxide, brown ochre and zinc white. Here's a little swatch of it:

It's not as warm as it looks on my screen, I'm very happy with it as a starting point for flesh tone mixes.

Somebody wants to be a model!