I finished another painting in my ‘Wildish Spirit’ series.  This painting is in honor of my daughter and her love of horses and I titled it “Violet and Grey.”  She took a lot of horseback riding lessons when she was young, so when I decided to paint one of my FAE characters based on her, I felt a wild horse needed to be part of the painting.

She left a couple of weeks ago, returning to Chicago for her last year in college.  I miss her SO MUCH!  I used her favorite color palette — purple, grey and black. It is a very cool toned palette and very different from my usual warm tones.  I did give her bangs and a bit of a wild hair-do to go with the horse’s wild mane.  I plan to hang the painting in her room, so when I walk by and glance in, I will see her in the painting, instead of her empty bedroom.

Of course, I am counting the days until Christmas break and I get to hug her again! 🙂

This is a close up picture to show the details of their faces.

I didn’t do a sketch this time, I just worked from photographs I took of her in the garden last December.  And the horse is a merging of about 4 different horses I looked at as reference, definitely a fantasy breed… with my usual big eyes. 🙂

Here are a few pictures of my process…

I painted the background in and then did a charcoal sketch on top of it.

Here is a picture from the side of the gallery wrapped canvas.  I don’t think I have shared the sides of my paintings before on my blog.  It’s a little hard to see in the picture below, but  I painted the name of the painting along the thick edge of the wrapped canvas.

I hope you have a wonderful, creative, day, Janell