What a challenge for me. Sketching Pete rolling meant he wasn’t standing still, squared up, and looking pretty. Instead, he was crunched, twisted, and all crazy looking. My goal of learning to draw horses in motion has been really enlightening.
I took a whole slew of photos of my horse the other night as he fussed and played with the other horses in his pasture. I tend toward taking pictures of him as he looks directly at me or grazes–in other words shots of him not moving–but I think it’s time to put more motion into my practice. Even the blurry shots are useful, and I plan on doing a whole series of various Pete sketches that take less than 30 minutes to complete.
I’m loving the gray toned Strathmore sketchbook, which is what I used for the first sketch. The second set is on a light cream color which isn’t as useful for his bay roan coloring. I lean toward choosing grays, dark blues and purples, and orange highlights, which work well on white or cool-colored papers.
I found the reference image of these pebbles in water on Paint My Photo, using only a small, cropped section of the picture. I used Neocolor II watersoluble crayons by Caran D’Ache. One thing that’s so neat about the crayons is that you can draw with them, which is what I did initially, but then use a brush on the crayon to pull off extra saturated pigment to add in the darks, highlights, and details.
Toned paper is more fun than I had imagined. I love practicing animal sketches from the old Walter T. Foster art books. They’re geared more toward oil and acrylic but I make do.
I keep practicing textures from the book 101 Textures for Colored Pencil:
Here’s the start of two metal point sketches, a little bunny and a mossy tree. I bit off more than I can chew with the tree, however. The detail is overwhelming. The bunny is on mineral paper, and the tree is on watercolor paper with the traditional silverpoint ground that came with my kit. I’ve found it’s very hard to photograph metalpoint because it’s shiny and reflects light.
