Tuesday, March 27, 2007

Canter, don't trot

Good afternoon, dear reader, and welcome back to the second installment of "Horses: Yes, They Are More Than Lawn Ornaments". In this case, they're the subject for my ACEO WIP (mmm, acronyms...)

Here you can take a gander at stage four:


I've gone and pushed more colour into the shadows to try and give it that "well groomed horse in the shadows" kind of look. More blue, violet, pink and a smidgen of cream thrown in for good measure. I do apologize, dear reader, but I can't recall what grey it was I used but I'll venture to say that it was most likely Warm Grey 50% and possibly 70%...that's Prisma Colour talk for all you non-coloured pencil users out there.

Before I post the final piece I'll remind you again of how I waffle over backgrounds. With this particular ACEO, due to the subject matter and the use of the blue paper it was very tempting for me to simply do up a graded blue background to give the impression of a sunny day. I love doing those types of background not only because they're easy to do but because I really feel it lends a nice atmosphere to the final image... and I'm infatuated with doing colour blending. A blue sky for something like this makes the final work feel bright, energetic, warm, and so on. That wasn't what I ultimately decided to do for this one and instead opted for this:

copyright Rita Woodburne


Although I had to go through those initial pangs of regret/ hesitation when laying down the greens (because my gut told me to go with a blue sky), this background works for me. Canter, don't trot, past that abstracted forested background. It's also been some time since I've had the opportunity to really play around with my greens and I was itching to use them. This can also be attributed the my eagerness to get planting things again and to see leaves on trees, but that's for another post altogether.

This ACEO won't be going up for auction on eBay and instead will be coming with me and some other ACEO's to the art fairs this summer. That said, if you'd like to purchase this one ($18.00 in Canuck dollars+ $2.00 for shipping) just e-mail me with the subject line reading: "Canter, don't trot" so I know that you're not someone trying to spam me. I hate spam, it's almost as disgusting as the canned stuff.

Hopefully this one has been of some use to someone out there in art and computer land. Until tomorrow!

2 comments:

Lisa B. said...

The green is unexpected, but it works really well with the light colors of the horse.

No worries- it's just your comfort zone expanding.

Rita said...

Thanks Lisa,
I've done a couple of horse pieces with this type of background before but the horses were much more detailed, drawing your eye away from the background.
The horse in this ACEO isn't as detailed and I think that's why I wasn't comfortable with it...at first. It's grown on me though and I always look at ACEO's as a means for experimenting anyway.