Rose Reiner, next segment!

Next installment. Ok, this is not translating quite right. Well, translation good, color wrong. That's what you get when you put Titanium white over a chestnut-y type color. picture blue (cool toned titanium) plus red = purple. This is kinda pinkish purple but you get my drift. But the effect is really friggin cool to me as far as the hair detail goes. This is with, oh, I don't know, 4 or 5 layers with a Kolinsky liner brush in varying shades of gray and light gray (with Titanium white as my base color for my mix). Tiny hairs. The next step will be to go in with acrylics and get my chestnut hairs back in there using some Coffee Brown, Nutmeg Brown and Burnt Sienna. Chestnut....not pink. But for now, here's where he stands....work has just been focused on his cheeks for now.



And then this is my attempt at 'skin' in the flank. Don't worry it's not going to look like this. This is just some gray 'skin' to apply acrylics on top off. In hindsight this would have probably been better done in gray pastels but this will do. It's just gonna look like crud until the next installment Stay tuned!

Just posted these.  Quicky videos on gray hooves that can hopefully help some folks out.  Both methods are SUPER easy:)  They aren't polished videos so I hope folks can still see enough to tell what's going on.

Here's a link to them

Method 1 - Super duper easy gray hooves :



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4aU9K07nuw0

Method 2 - Easy but more detailed gray hooves

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHRuN808KFc


Hope you find these helpful!

Jaime

Next installment

Added in more specks and spots and made existing ones bigger.



Then went over those with a thin white wash (only on upper neck, not on shoulder) This is exactly what I was looking for. I kept the color but I subdued it down to where it looks more natural in the coat (I think so anyway)

Rose Reiner, experimental technique

Long time no see!  I apologize for my absence but really, my time is so limited I don't have a ton left over at the end of the day to keep up with the Blog  But I wanted to start documenting a new technique I'm trying out.  This is going to be a very speckledy, fleabitten-y, tiny spotted appy when it's all said and done.  Hopefully anyway.  I'm going to go over my technique for the speckled neck on this beasty first...since this is my new technique.  Not sure if I'll succeed or fail but you'll either learn something new and learn what not to do. 

Ok, the first thing I need to tackle is the neck. I went in applied pigments with a pointed q-tip to the neck This was just to get choppy color, I wasn't trying to get the small spots/fleabites with this.




The next step was to do white hairs over all of those pigments. Note, this was not a white 'wash'. I used a Kolinsky Reservoir Liner Size 2, series 1310 and did tiny little white hairs all throughout the neck. Many, many layers of this too. This was to break up the pigments even further and put them 'under the coat' so to speak, creating more of a gray speckled look. Again, this is all experimental. This was only done on the neck, you can see the shoulder has not had acrylics done on it yet.



The next step was to go in and lay down acrylics to form the spots and fleabites. Unfortunately, I was thinking 'fleabites' and currently these hairs are too small as what the reference photo has is a smidge bigger than a typical fleabite would be (in my small experience with fleabitten horses anyway)



Now let's get to the WHY I'm doing it this way. When I looked at the many photos supplied of the reference horse I saw fleabites, tiny spots, and gray areas throughout that neck (gray as in, white hair on top of the spots OR skin, not actual gray hairs). I want all of those things to show on the neck. By going over the initial pigment 'spots' I have created the gray tones underneath the coat. Right now the fleabites are too dark and contrasting too much against the white. Once I get all of them laid down, I will go back over them with white hair detail. In theory, if I keep the acrylics thin enough this will create a subtle wash over the color and subdue it down to be closer to the reference horse. Just one layer should do...anymore will shift them gray and subdue them too much. I need color to still show. We shall see. Stay tuned...more photos coming soon.