Thursday, February 7, 2013

Odds and Ends

Lots of little things to update this week. First off, here are a couple of Myla Pearce's mule medallions that I painted. Good "mealy muzzle" practice!

I was running late this morning so all of these photos are hastily snapped in natural light. I used a little Photoshop in the backgrounds of these medallions just to get rid of some of the distracting thing that they are leaning on.
This little Imp is a commission, he will be a minimal pinto. He's at a really early stage.
This Little Lonestar commission arrived with an eartip MIA so I'm fixing that while I prep him. It still needs a little refining.
The Rose Reiner I've been working on had an unfortunate mishap and his ear broke off, so I've been repairing that, too. I was really mad about this one because I was getting ready to finish him up when it happened. 
I'm not sure if this will show up, I had to darken the exposure on this Sushi to try to show some of the light-colored detail. This poor horse has changed so many times as I tried to get the "look" I wanted on her. She's gone from blue-ish gray to a warmer gray to somewhere in-between, and her mane/tail changed a little bit, too. I originally envisioned her to be moderately fleabit, but for a while she was looking really heavily fleabit, but now she's back to what I was originally thinking for her, with moderate/light fleabites and some darker bites. They're probably not called bites but that's what I call them ;)

Anyway, for a long time I felt that her topline was a little too stark compared to the rest of her body with all the varied bites, but I finally went in and made little hair marks that are slightly darker than the body color, and I think this really made all the difference. This is a terrible photo and I will try to get better ones next week.  This is the only model I've ever painted that I couldn't stop working on. Honestly, I could still keep going but I have to stop at some point. I put a boatload of hours into her, so this is another one of those long, drawn-out learning experiences.  I don't see a ton of fleabit grays out there, and I found it to be a huge challenge and much more difficult than I expected. I don't know if I'll do another one anytime soon.

Okay, that's it for this week!