And So It Begins (Again)!

Since yesterday's post, I've laid out a gameplan for this month's paintings. I've already said I'm going to be painting the Plate hopefuls, and what I've decided to do is a bit of a pictoral play-by-play of getting a horse to the Queen's Plate, from where it all starts, in my mind, to the big race itself.

We start somewhere that's quite familiar to me these days: on the farm. The key to any successful breeding program is the broodmares. There's an old racetrack saying: "Breed the best to the best" and all the hype in the world doesn't usually help a stallion if he doesn't get good mares. Today's painting is of a Thoroughbred broodmare. I joke every year, with each foal..."This one's the Plate winner!" Model for the day is Set Destiny, or Dez, owned by a friend of mine. Dez and one of her foals have been featured in a few of my oil pastel paintings, "Fresh Outlook" being the most famous of those.

Today's painting is 8 x 10 oil on panel. As my paints are still in transit from Saskatchewan, I had to improvise for my palette! This is a bit of mishmash of ideas, too. I laid out my palettle like we learned at the Val Hinz workshop, but had to substitute a few colours, and completely go without others. I also used a little tidbit Michelle Grant shared with me in our airport visit, using Transparent Iron Oxide to tone my panel...then I used it extensively in the painting, I liked it so much. This photo falls seriously short of capturing the original - I'm in love with Transparent Iron Oxide now, and disappointed that you can't really see the effect of it in the image above! Ah well...

Day one is complete....can you guess what I'm going to paint tomorrow?

This painting is available for sale in my online Etsy store for $250.00 plus shipping (and applicable taxes for Canadians).