On The Easel - A Portrait
January 26, 2008
This is a horse I saw and photographed back in 2003 or 2004 at a local event called Matfield Green Days. Matfield Green is a tiny little village on the K-177 Scenic By Way through the Flint Hills. It is a great place to watch trains if you are so inclined (and my husband and I are) and a place we often pass through on our way to and from the Flint Hills.
On this particular sunny, summer day, Matfield Green was also a festival day celebrating its history as a rail town and cow town. The event included talks on the significance of the Santa Fe Railroad to the area (given by my husband), cowboy singing and, of course, horses. Most of the horses were involved in an event called cowboy polo in which two teams chased a ball around a field marked off by bales of hay. It was quite exciting and entertaining; definitely something I had never seen before. I shot three or four rolls of film on it and intend to paint a 'polo' scene one of these days.
For now, the look and authenticity of the polo ponies will be my subject and I have selected three of them to use a subjects. This unusually colored fellow is the first.
The first step is to sketch out the basic design. Since this is a portrait style painting with only a nominal background, my only real concern is getting a good likeness of the horse and equipment. I am using a basic colored pencil on tracing paper.
This sketch was completed in 20 or 30 minutes during the pre-game warmup for a Wichita State University Shocker Women's Basketball game. Neal, plays in the Pep Band and we like to go to each other's events, so I usually have something to work on. Tonight, it was this guy.
By the way, the Shocker girls won a rough and tumble game with the Indiana State Sycamores in a gutsy, come from behind victory. Go Shockers!
January 29, 2008
After the initial drawing is done, I turn over the tracing paper and work on the drawing in reverse, using a pencil of a different color. In this case red. I do this because it gives me a fresh point of view on the drawing and is a lot easier than carrying around a mirror in order to see the drawing in reverse.
Three days passed between the first drawing and this one, so I also had the advantage of time and could see some problems with the first step. The most obvious is that the face is not long enough in the drawing.
That and other inaccuracies were corrected on the back of the paper, then I turned over the paper again and made further adjustments to the front.
And that is the drawing process for me. Working from the general to the specific, most drawings go through several stages of this front-and-back process until they are as good as they can be made. The more complicated the composition, the more time it will take.
When the drawing was satisfactory, I used a fresh sheet of tracing paper and an ordinary ball point pen to make an ink copy of the drawing.
The copy will be the appropriate size for the canvas. In this case, the working canvas is stretched to 9x12, so only a minimual amount of enlargement will be necessary. If I were working on a miniature, the drawing would actually have to be reduced. If the canvas were larger, the drawing would be enlarged.