This is Ollie, a magnificent looking horse who is my second horse portrait from photo. Ollie's portrait was a surprise birthday gift to his owner, Sophie so I have been unable to upload this until now as she has received the portrait
I really enjoyed getting the colour right on this horse, I really do like working as a horse portrait artist, I'm not sure if it is because I have not done many but it was hard but enjoyable work. As you can see by the first update, the colouring consists of many layers, I began using pale peach, then ochre to give the golden undercolouring, then I added light shading to give muscle definition with medium brown. As usual though I did begin with the eyes to give the Ollie some charactor.
Here you can see I worked along Ollie's cheek, this has already made him look more realistic already. I have gone back over the nose and forehead adding further layers to build up depth of colour plus I have burnished in some areas to give the impression of sheen as Ollie's coat is very shiny.
Here I have worked on Ollie's ears, they are very alert and give a clue as to his personality. I have also started to add a pastel background of black. This background proved successful with Roli's horse portrait from photo so I decided to use the same technique for Ollie. It creates great contrast and makes his colouring much more vibrant.
Unfortunately this was such a rush job I had to take a photo of the finished portrait at night time under a lightbulb which has altered the colour somewhat, you can see the difference from the update above which was taken in daylight, however I had to frame the portrait for collection very early the next morning so could not take a better photo.
Pencil Portraits from Photos Horse Portrait from Photo by Horse Portrait artist Karie-Ann Cooper 
