Today was sort of a “two steps backward and one step forward” day for this piece.

It was the third Wednesday of the month, which meant it was the regular day for the Colored Pencil Circle at the Carriage Factory Gallery.

That meant it was time to pull out this black Morgan mare and put in another hour. As a reminder, this is a colored pencil on black Rising Stonehenge paper.

To begin with, I used a Prismacolor Clear blender to blend the greens because I thought they were competing a little bit too much with the horse. That smoothed and blurred some of the sharper edges and was supposed to create a smoother color layer. That part didn’t work and I discovered the blender was so old it was starting to dry out.

After I was finished with the blender, I used Limepeel applied in close horizontal strokes to further smooth out the color fields in both the trees and the grass. That was followed with Yellow Chartreuse applied in vertical strokes over all of the greens.

I did use a little bit of Dark Umber and Dark Green, as well, but the greens are too dark, so I want to continue to focus on lightening those areas more.

The little bit of work I did on the horse revolved around the head and the tail, both of which I lightened with Cloud Blue in the cool areas and Yellow Ochre in the warm areas.

I will probably need to bring the painting home and work on it from the reference photo on my computer so that I can enlarge it enough to see details. Hopefully that will happen before the next Colored Pencil circle, but with my schedule looking the way it currently looks, that may be more than I can manage.

It is somewhat frustrating to work on the same piece month after month and for only an hour at a time. It does seem to be a process that works, though. Each time I take out the painting for the next work session, it looks better than I expected it to.

I fully expect to take it out one of these months and realize it’s done!

©Copyright 2008 by Carrie Lewis. See original post here.
To learn more about this artist, visit Carrie Lewis’s website.