Indoor Activities

It's hard to believe a week ago we had our coldest night of the winter. Today it rained off and on all day, and naturally the new baby spent the day indoors. As you can see, he still did his best to test out his legs.


The horses that did get out came in as soon as their stalls were ready. I managed to get some painting done in the afternoon. As my plans to post this painting were interrupted on Monday night by the new kid's arrival, I'll post it here. I can't even remember what I was going to say about it! It's 24 x 24 oil on gallery wrap canvas, and this is just the beginning of the underpainting, using Ultramarine Blue, Burnt Sienna and Unbleached Titanium. This is a Thoroughbred in the post parade at Woodbine, and I just love the angle of this horse's head. It makes things a bit more challenging, but there's nothing wrong with that. There is a bit of glare coming off of the canvas because of the wet paint, but this is the progress to date!


I'm hoping to have a more normal sleep tonight - last night I still watched Twine and baby a bit through the night to be sure everything was okay. We're supposed to get a lot of rain tonight. I'm guessing a lot of the snow will be gone by morning! I'm not sure I'm looking forward to that. What can you do?

Comeback

Okay, I feel a lot better about today's painting than I did yesterday's, though to be fair I put a lot more time into it, starting much earlier. I've been looking forward to working from this photo, so I went back to a 10 x 8 masonite panel. After working smaller, that made things easier as well. So this is Mike Fox in the post parade before winning the '07 Queen's Plate. It was nice to do him with the sun hitting him - in the previous painting I did of him, on his way to victory, he's more in shadow so I didn't get to play with colours quite the way I did here. I still used the limited palette, however.

I forgot to mention one very important thing about yesterday's painting - I didn't have a panel prepared that was the appropriate size, so despite my complete dislike for working on a white ground, that's what I did. Can you tell? I sure could, and that contributed to my struggle - as if I wasn't having enough trouble!