Eagle Trio Sketches and Painting

I know I alluded in an earlier post about an eagle themed painting I was going to do. Well, it's finished and made into a beaded bookmark that's available in my Etsy and Artfire shops. I have to say, I'm pretty pleased with how the finished product looks. This post will be about the painting process though, just my thoughts about how this miniature painting came about.

I have in mind for a series of bookmarks of southwest wildlife animals, such as eagles, cougars and bears to start. Eagles and birds of prey have always been a fascinating subject for me so I chose eagles to start. In researching my reference photos, I decided on a collage of three scenes, a young eagle bust, an eagle in flight, and an adult eagle bust. So I had the reference pics chosen and then set out to make tonal drawings and sketches. Since I don't have a lot of experience painting birds, the tonal sketches will help give a better guideline of where to push the dark values, the mid range values and light values. I sketched the eagles freehand from the reference pics as I need a very small size to fit on the bookmark size paper. Sure, I could have manipulated the reference pic copies to a small enough size and then just traced the outline, however, I wanted to work on my artistic skills and chose the long tedious way. And yes, my eraser got a good work out but I learned so much in the process.

The page of sketches:

Compiling this type of composition took some math skills, which I sorely have struggled with all my life (I'm also slightly dyslectic). It took some time to get the balance just right and then all the resizing of the sketches of the birds. I used the eagle eye as the balance reference, draw the eye first and then balance the rest of the bird around the eye. Seemed to me to be the logical choice of where to start! Now what gave me the most grief was getting the beaks curved and positioned just right!! I never knew . So I wound up breaking the beaks down to a series of stacked blocks to give me a better perspective of attaining the three dimensional look. You can see that in the lower right hand bust sketch. My eraser got the most workout here!

Pics of the finished sketches:

Once the sketches and composition was done now onto the actual painting! Doing the sketches gave me a great base to work from and helped me tweak some changes as I was doing the painting. I used mostly Faber Castell watercolor pencils, they have great color and flow with water, and some creata color and derwents brand pencils too. Unfortunately I did not keep notes or pics of my painting process so I don't have them to show here. So that's a project for the next wildlife painting! Here is the finished product with the sketch reference:

This was a wonderful learning process, it may have taken me a while, but when you insists on learning at your own pace, that's what happens!

"The Inviting Path", first of a series

Don't you love it when you finally get going on something you know you should be doing? Finally, I finished my first bookmark painting. I call it "The Inviting Path". After all these years of trying all kinds of horse riding activities, my absolute favorite riding endeavour is heading down a trail in the wide open spaces. There is such a bonding experience between rider and horse from doing something so simple as going from point A to point B down a path, whether it's for an hour or 24 hours!

As this painting is for a bookmark purpose, I wanted to tie in the theme with purpose. Reading a book takes the reader on an adventure for fiction or fact. If you will, taking the reader down a path. So here is a path painted that I hope folks find just as inviting as the book it's in to read! Notice how the horse has the right ear facing back; he's listening to the rider or reader in this case to keep going forward!

This is a freestyle painting, I used no reference photos, just what I saw in my imagination. My watercolor pencil palette was pretty simple of a few greens, yellows, browns and indigo blue and ultramarine blue for the background and my horse is a few violets, paynes's grey, indigo blue. I decided to put in a wildflower field in the distance and used a permanent red, orange chrome and a pink to add some bright color. Bookmark size of approx. 2.25" wide by 7.25" high on white Lenox 100 cotton rag paper (I LOVE this multi-purpose art paper for small projects!) I will put this painting inside a vinyl bookmark sleeve and embellish the top with a leather cord and wonderful silver horse charm. I plan on putting this up in my Etsy shop as soon as I get a few more bookmarks created.

Ok, so now that this first one is started, I'm going to stay on this momentum and get going on the next! And I will be sure to post it on the blog as soon as I can!

Hanging Out the Shingle

This is Sisco, my partner in all equine endeavors! He's the third of my lifetime horses so far. My first horse I got when I was 16, and we shared adventures for the next 25 years. My second horse partner, who taught me through the school of hard knocks, how to truly discover the ART of listening and understanding horses, was with me for ten years. Both of these horses have passed over the rainbow bridge in recent years. So, now it's just Sisco and I, and we are in our third year of being together.

These horses over the years have provided so many days of inspiration for my future art ideas and expressions. So have so many other horses I have encountered over the past almost 30 years I've been a "horse person". Seems like I needed all this experience first so I can now hang my shingle out as a horse artist!

When I was younger, I showed a talent for art, painting and drawing, horses, horses and more horses. I didn't develop that talent as I entered college and went into another direction in life. Now, after a few decades, I felt drawn back to drawing and painting. I think it's a mid life crisis, LOL! Whatever it is, I love having this activity as part of my life again!

Around two years ago, I started searching out art sites and began to re-educate myself about drawing and painting and began the creative process. And while my art production maybe a bit slow, I'm now feeling that I'm getting my rhythm now and have begun to build a portfolio to share. And now, here is this blog, another way to share my art creations!

Next blog time, the art sharing begins!!!