Bridle Horse

The subject matter of this one was inspired by a halter in a Gerome painting of Arab Horsemen seen on James Gurney's blog (which I highly recommend). The entry it is from can be found here. Not completely captured, but it's such a beautiful halter I knew I had to draw it, at least in a practice piece. The rest of it was inspired by a broken ballroom company earring I found at work (which happens to be the dance department's costume shop) It was quite large (in the nature of most ballroom dance jewelry) and also quite glittery (also in the nature of ballroom jewelry) It was a Swarovsky crystal which was mostly cool blues and greens, with a good deal of gray if you could manage to not look at the sparkly parts, and every once in a while threw out an awesome orangey-red flare.

As close to what I'd call a 'breakthrough piece' as I think I can bring myself to say. Gouache and I are really starting to hit it off. Especially combined with ink. This is another from Media Experimentation, with the 'experimentation' part being to take an inked drawing, paint thick gouache over it, then wash the paint off. It makes for a very cool stained paper (er, Illustration board, I should say) effect. Some re-inking and opaque paint was added afterward, but it came out surprisingly well after the initial round of paint, so I didn't have to work on it too much. I don't think horses can have that color of eyes, but I thought it was cool. Artistic license. 'Nuff said.