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.