Horse Art Tutorial – Carriage Horses in Mixed Media
by Toni-Marie Hudson

This tutorial of a mixed media painting will demonstrate how Toni-Marie uses a variety of media, including watercolor pencil, colored pencil, acrylic, graphite and ink, to realistically paint two Carriage Horses, Sam and Ben.

Materials: I use mixed media, which is acrylic, colored pencil, ink, usually black but sometimes other colors, watercolor pencil and some graphite.

I use smooth watercolor paper (fabriano) 140lb. It has to be smooth because grainy doesn't go well with fine detail and colored pencils go too grainy on textured paper.

Colored pencil goes over dry watercolor with a pastel type affect which can be useful. You can't use dark colored pencil over dried pale acrylic though generally because the acrylic dries solid and because it always has little tiny bumps and things in it from the brush strokes, the pencil crayon will just deposit color on those raised areas more and it looks a mess and colored pencil doesn't work that brilliant on dry acrylic anyway, also, this can lift the acrylic in little patches and leave white bits where the paper is visible again but you can paint those.

It's just a case of trying whatever you think of at the time to see if it works. If it doesn't, there is plenty of room to sort it out as mixed media is quite forgiving. You can paint over it entirely with more opaque acrylic. A little experience with each medium and it's tendencies will certainly help though as this will give you the intuition as to whether an idea will work or not.

The subjects: Sam and Ben, two carriage horses, both to be in the same painting. Sam has his mane tied on the wrong side in his photo. It is supposed to be on the near side. The owner asked me if I could paint it on the near side.

Sam

The first step is to set up the composition and to decide which one will work the best. Ben's left ear was too thin in the outlines. It has since been corrected.

Composition #2 was decided upon.

#1

I have started painting Sam now. I did the eye and the area directly around it first but the next section, I have decided to post in steps so you can see how I get the finished effect.

The fourth is after I have put on a second layer of watercolor pencil, this time adding a small amount of black to the darkest areas then using normal colored pencils to finish it up and start the impressions of tonal details. I used a hard dark brown pencil crayon for the darker areas and I used a bit if yellow ochre (Softer and more waxy daler rowney) for the highlighted bits.

Next will come the acrylic.

I don't attempt to put any impressions of hair in the first layers. They go on once the base color has enough depth to it and the main tonal values have been started. Adding hairs further adds to the tonal changes.

Here I have added acrylic to the area, painting in highlights and darks and adding more richness to the general area. It actually looks like it is attached to the eye area now. I used acrylic on fine brushes and a sharpened dark brown colored pencil to add impressions of hair and some paler acrylic to add the highlights. I also used black ink and dotted it finely in the darker areas. The darker it was, the more dense the flecks are. In some areas, I had to then quickly go over the ink while it was still wet with a dark colored pencil to blend it in slightly. The initial untouched strokes were slightly too harsh.
I also used some very pale acrylic to add the stray white hairs around that white blaze.

For the forelock, I painted in a dark brown base color then painted the hair on top, gradually working lighter as I went. The forelock isn't done yet. Well, I'm not happy with it yet anyway. I've also done a bit more work down the other side of the face but that isn't finished yet either.

As for the area on this side, just some final touches will finish that off. Some of the pale hairs are too large and pronounced and need to be toned down and made smaller with a dark colored pencil.

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