Paul Wolber Art Studio

Here’s the finished stage. You may not be able to tell from this
small image the additions I’ve made to the horses, but they are
obvious in the actual piece. The harness arrangement is very
interesting to me so I spent some time on that. I’ve also created
the space of the field and hedge row trying to keep them as
simple as possible to avoid distraction from the foreground.
If done properly I find each stage of this process interesting and
almost a finished work on it’s own.

I had little time in the studio today, but this evening I began to rough in more of the color on the horses and fill in more of the foreground. Next I’ll need to work on shadows and details of harness that ties the horses together, then figure out how to deal with the background area to give more space and depth to the image. Keep watching.

Now I start to lay in the color composition starting from left to
right with the Amish man seated on the plow. The Amish don’t
wish to have their image taken so I’ve obliged that a bit by covering
the mans face with his hat ostensibly to cover his eyes from the sun.
I’ll continue more posting as I develop the rest, so check back later.

Detail Amish man

Second stage was to paint the ground color. I used a pink/orange
ground here to set the tone of the late afternoon sunlight as the
ambient light for this painting. Next, after transferring the drawing,
I like to lay in the darkest and lightest tones to set the range
of values in the painting.

The first stage was developing the drawing. In this case I did the
drawing on paper since I wanted to work out some of the movement
in the horses gait and to show the person who requested it. Next
step is to transfer the drawing to the hand primed gessoed board
on the ground color you can see below.

© Copyright by Paul Wolber