I felt like doing something a little different in the studio yesterday. Something moved me to do a horse painting, so that's what I did. But I made my horse blue for a touch of fantasy.
First I'll say that this looks better in person than it does in the photo. Neither my scanner nor my camera seemed to want to capture a good image today for some reason. But I think you'll get the idea.
The horse is done in Inktense pencils. If you've never used Inktense, they come in both pencil and block forms. I have both, but I used the pencils on this. The pencils work much like watercolor pencils, in that you draw with them and then add water. Only with Inktense, the "leads" are made with compressed ink pigment instead of watercolor. The ink becomes super vibrant once it's wet, and adding any wet media (water, gesso, etc) is what makes the color permanent. So with the horse I drew him in regular pencil, then outlined with Inktense. Then I added water, then added more Inktense and more water, and I kept repeating that until I was happy with the horse. I did the background with Inktense and stencils. There's a tiny bit of Pitt pen that I used on the horse's eye, so with that this is technically a mixed media painting. But it is mostly Inktense, and it's done on watercolor paper.
I've never really painted a horse before. I did do a unicorn with my recent Unicorn Girl painting, but that was a little more whimsical than this. I love how it turned out, and I don't think it's too shabby at all for my first horse. Who knows, maybe I'll do another one of these days.
