April 12
Horses are nototiously difficult to capture on paper, as in fact are all animals, but the advice of equestrian artist Eva Dutton should help your confidence grow. Drawing and Painting Horses offers step-by-step information on how to take your first sketches and develop them into finished paintings. There is practical information on how to draw from life; reducing the moving subject to a series of ovals and circles will help you gain confidence and give life and proportion to your subjects. A section on anatomical drawings provides the framework you need to get started on the right track, without overwhelming you with detail, while using pipe cleaner models will describe the animal's posture by eliminating all the unnecessary details. Once the basic shapes have been established, Eva moves on to techniques, shading and tone, and portraying movement, before embarking on details: eyes, ear positions, muzzle, hooves, etc. There is a detailed section on how to capture horses in colour, including examples of colour mixing for coats and manes, and how to manipulate, scumble, and stipple paint to best effect. The book concludes with five step-by-step demonstrations, each including up to 64 pages.
* Leisure Painter, The *
May 12
Horses have been popular subjects for artists for a very long time; one of the earliest pieces of artwork in Britain is a horse scratched onto a piece of bone! Here is a book devoted to the subject for all budding Stubbs.
This book features painting in watercolors and gouache, but the skills learned ought to translate well to any chosen medium -- possibly even making your own piece of latterday scrimshaw on a bone of your choice as there is plenty about drawing, not only as a preliminary to painting but in its own right. There are lessons in here about getting under the skin of a horse and discovering how they move and what they look like in different positions. Poseable wooden figures of horses are expensive, so why not make your own out of pipe cleaners, a wonderful idea. Many sketches show how a drawing is built up out of ovals, and there are some excellent series of simple drawings showing what a horse looks like at the various stages of a walk, trot, canter and gallop. All these tips are handsomely illustrated, and I found them easy to follow-- a series of mini lessons and ideas to try out which add up to progress at drawing a tricky animal. There are five projects in here to test out your skills, complete with what you need to buy and lots of illustrated stages. If you want to get to grips with painting horses this large format hardcover book is an excellent purchase.
* Myshelf.com *
December 2014
Originally published in 2012 (and reviewed in Leisure Painter's April 2012 issue), Eva Dutton's Drawing and Painting Horses is now available in paperback. The book includes step-by-step information on how to develop rapid sketches into finished paintings. There's plenty of advice and practical tips as well as five demonstrations to follow.
* Leisure Painter, The *
