The top painting is an illustration of Paul Revere for the most recent issue of Seeing The Everyday magazine. The others are various illustrators versions of horses, and Paul Revere. I really haven't painted horses at all, and definitely needed some help, so NC Wyeth was a strong inspiration, as you can see. I usually don't borrow this heavily from other paintings, but there just wasn't other reference available (Google was surprisingly disappointing on this one). This piece was more a practice exercise for me than anything, and I learned so much from Wyeth's dynamic poses and strong brushwork. Wow, that man can paint the horse! About 1:30am as I was cleaning my brushes, I realized that I had made the head too small, and it was starting to look like a little giraffe head. A little Photoshop magic helped fix that this morning before I sent it off for publication, but it was a good reminder that sound drawing underscores everything. And that, like anything else, it just takes practice, practice, practice! I actually highly recommend doing masterwork copies as an exercise to improve, and this piece reinforced that I would benefit from doing more close masterwork study.
Super cool Dave. Love the limited palette, very Corwallian :)
ReplyDeleteThat piece is really cool Dave. I kind of like how dark it is. I mean, it's his night ride, and all, but it has this dark feel of something exciting about to happen. Anyway, good job. I think the horse looks fantastic. Frightened, nervous, energized.
ReplyDeleteThanks Adam and Dan-o, I appreciate your thoughts. Any strength in the horse is definitely a product of NC Wyeth! And Adam, that's kind of you to mention Dean Cornwell. I was very much hearkening back to that palette on purpose to have a subtle tie-in to the fact that most of our association with Revere is based in Longfellow and early magazine illustration. I considered doing a bold vignette like Cornwell, but the night aspect of the piece seemed to keep requiring a bounding box to control the values enough to carry time of day. And let's be honest, I'm no Cornwell. I'm sure he could have done it:)
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