Painting the Black Horse - Did I bite off more than I can chew?

Wow! I've just completed my biggest ever painting and it was a total beast.

I've tried to push myself in order to ramp up the improvement trajectory and so wanted to do something ambitious. When my mate Mike asked me to paint him a really big horse painting for his pub, The Black Horse in Nibley, I jumped at the chance. I mean it's the perfect pub to put up paintings of horses in, right? You've just got to say yes to these things as they present themselves and worry about it later. Also it was an actual commission and Mike gave me free reign to just paint what I wanted but it needed to be big. So I chose A1 size, 33" X 23" - pretty darn big for me!

Immediately, I knew I wanted to do a piece that was a bit more than a horse portrait, but something moody and dramatic. So I got my little artist sketchbook out and started writing some ideas down. I love the history of these old pubs and The Black Horse in Nibley has that amazing historic Cotswold feel about it. My imagination was fired by highwaymen and cold misty nights. I started by trying to find some images of highwaymen on horses and then realised that I want to feature the black horse itself more than the highwayman and so ditched the man and started hunting for a decent black horse. Source material for artists is a bit of a sticking point and I'll go over that in a later blog but eventually I found a royalty free image a beautiful black stallion and so set up my composition using my canva app.

I was looking for a pretty dark and bleak feel to the painting, frozen ground and bare trees and wanted to feature the pub in it too. So I fiddled around with composition until I had something that I felt was quite dramatic and hinted at the history of the place.

This was all new to me but it was great fun designing a painting that would reflect a mood. If I could do that then I was reaching toward something that I want my painting to try to achieve. To reflect a sense of story and mood. It's a lofty ambition and you can be the judge of whether it was achieved.

It was a tough old job. I sketched out the scene first, making sure I got the proportions of the horse bang on. There's nothing worse than getting half way through a painting and realising your subject looks a bit skew-whiff! Once I had that down, I very carefully made sure the building was straight. I'm not great at straight lines and although I'd love to be able to draw buildings well, they are very difficult to get right.

Once the sketch was down I began in earnest, blocking in with burnt umber. For those of you reading this who aren't painters, that's the process of getting the underpainting done. It allows you to work out your values, the darks and the lights.

That's where I made my first mistake. I gave the black horse a reddish undertone when really the look I was going for was a colder wintry look, deep blues and a colder palette. So when I painted over the underpainting, I was struggling to keep the blacks cool.

It's all fine though, because making mistakes and then fixing them is the best way to learn. My background was also a warmer tone too, a kind of rose white but in the process of fixing it with bluer washes of white and bluer blacks on the horse's coat, I found that the reds and the blues were complimentary.

Another thing I learned was trying to paint silhouettes is harder than I expected. I wanted to paint the foreground trees completely black but it just didn't look right. I know its to do with understanding how to load my paint on the paintbrush and painting in more confident strokes but in order to 'fix' the painting I was working on, I needed to bring a bit more realism to the trees. So I added some light bark effects and it saved the trees from looking really awful. So the painting evolved as I worked on it in terms of colour and the overall effect. This was one of the biggest lessons for me, I know what I want to see or rather what I want to feel when I look at it but the route for getting there is by no means straightforward.

Anyway, I grafted on this one, spending hours and hours trying to get the elements and the whole feel of the painting right. After four long painting sessions over a week, I finally finished 'The Black Horse' and I like it.

I pushed myself to make this one and think I've made some good progress as a painter. I mean there's stuff in it that I need to improve on but I think it does convey the mood I dreamed up.

I've shown Mike and thankfully he loves it too! The great thing is, its going to sit on the wall of that beautiful old pub and people are actually going to be looking at it for years to come. You can't get much better than that!