The Farrier

[Enug]

From a WC reference photo. I experimented with Sticker Spray watercolour brushes. Stencils for the background and some airbrushing.

[Caesar]

Fine painting.
Indoubtedly the horse looks very interered to have a good work done, either in the picture and in Your painting! I guess the guy's work contemplates also adding spring-shoes under tamed kangaroos hind legs over there .... LOL

[D Akey]

Values are what set the tone for a painting. I mean one can get by doing any old thing and could make it work in context. But anchoring the image with some darks makes it stronger in my book, and it allows for more values to turn the form and not get out of hand. It's really easy, in my experience, to be going along painting, all thrilled and feeling I had everything well in hand, only to find that I did not go dark enough. It's a real easy pitfall. In fact when I was painting in oil, and doing landscape, I would take some black electrical tape and put it just sticking out from behind the canvas just to make sure I had the full value range happening. My natural inclination was to go light.

I once had a teacher who insisted that we do thumbnail sketches and get all the values exact. We could be a little sloppy with the placement, but the full value range had to exist. Good lesson. Colors had to be right as well, but that was another lesson. Ultimately you wanted to get it all correct.

Anyway, you have all the stuff happening here, except you're missing the darks and as such some of it is tending to flatten out. I mean we can look at this and know what's what. But to take the painting to the full range of values would improve the effect.

Nice otherwise. You should feel good about this one.

[Enug]

Fine painting.
Indoubtedly the horse looks very interered to have a good work done, either in the picture and in Your painting! I guess the guy's work contemplates also adding spring-shoes under tamed kangaroos hind legs over there .... LOL

Now that is quite a novel idea dear Caesar it's a wonder some entrepreneur hasn't already thought of that!

Mr.Akey, you have hit the nail on the head! You may have noticed I edited the post - the first image had a drop shadow around the subjects as I thought it looked a bit flat. It still didn't look right so I removed the shadow layer. Often, not always obviously, I will look at an image in greyscale to check the values/tones and now when I look at this image in greyscale I can see just what went wrong.

I've made some adjustments and to my eye, it looks better.

[Caesar]

I confirm it imrpoved dramatically, alco in comparison to the picture!

[Marilyn Anne]

Well done! You have really captured the scene. I like your technique too!

[Enug]

Thanks Caesar and Marilyn for the nice words.