In a previous post in this series, I answered a question about horses and horse stories. The reader also asked how I found my style, and I’d like to answer that question today.
Here’s the question.
How did you come to your style, what were your influences, techniques, etc, that led to your personal style of drawing horses in particular?
How I Found My Style
Before I answer the question, I need to say that I didn’t start drawing horses to develop a style. The truth is that when I began, I knew nothing about style. In fact, only two things were certain.
I liked drawing horses.
I wanted my horses to look as real as possible.
Those were the guideposts by which I worked. Actually, saying they were guideposts isn’t entirely accurate either. The best way I can describe it is that they were as natural to me as breathing. Who has to explain what breathing means to them? No one!
What Influenced my Style
Magazines
At the beginning, the biggest influence to my style was the stunning photographs in the horse magazines to which I subscribed. The Blood-Horse (Thoroughbred horse racing). A couple of magazines dedicated to the Arabian horse and a western magazine or two.
Some of them had advertisements for artists, but all of them had beautiful, full color pictures of horses. It was those photographs more than anything that motivated my painting and drawing in the first years of my portrait career.
Later on, I discovered The Artist’s Magazine, where there was plenty of helpful information on art in general. For many years, I was a subscriber even though they had little to say about horse art or colored pencils.
Other Artists
Other artists who specialized in horse art also helped me with my work. Seeing how someone else created the play of light on a horse’s coat or portrayed the facial features was very helpful. (that’s one reason I so enjoy publishing CP Magic, by the way. I hope to do the same thing for other artists.)
Two artists made a special impact on me in the early years.
Glen Loates was the first. He was a wildlife artist who painted everything from white tail deer to chipmunks. I acquired a multi-page brochure filled with his artwork and I remember going out on walks with that brochure, soaking it all in while sitting under my favorite tree at the edge of a field. His works were mostly vignettes in those days, with the subject on a pristine white background, but they were beautiful. His website features many of those images as well as many new ones, including the originals of some of those images I drooled over years ago.
The first horse artist I remember is Fred Stone. He specialized in race horses and his portraits of Exceller, Seattle Slew, and Secretariat (among many, many others) proved a horse artist could succeed. The biggest surprise to me was learning Mr. Stone worked in watercolor. His portraits were so life-like I thought they were oils.
The Biggest Influence on my Style
But I think the biggest influence was the horses themselves. I never had a horse growing up but there were Shetland ponies across the road, and many neighbors rode horses. I attended horse shows at every opportunity and photographed horses both for pleasure and looking for potential subjects. Just looking at them was a huge influence in how I drew and painted them.
Techniques that Contributed my Style
I can’t think of any techniques that truly influenced my style except maybe for one. Rather, it was more a case of finding techniques and tools the helped me achieve what I wanted to achieve with every painting.
That first technique was something my mother taught me about blending oils. The way she showed me was to lay two colors side by side, touching but not overlapping, then drag a soft brush along the edge. I learned that technique while doing oil paint-by-number sets as a teen. I was using a version of that when I painted my last portrait in oils some years ago.
The biggest advance I made was when I stopped using student grade oils and started using artist quality oils. M. Graham Oils in particular were beautiful to glaze with and the colors were so vibrant! That single change proved the value of using the best supplies possible. That lesson transferred to colored pencils.
These days, the technique that contributes most to my style isn’t a technique at all; it’s paper. Clairefontaine Pastelmat to be specific. I can layer colored pencils on that, blend, lift color, and layer more color until current portraits look very close to the oil portraits of years gone by.
That’s How I Found My Style
I guess a better way to put it is that my style found me. It developed naturally as I gained skills, acquired better tools, and created one portrait after another.
The truth is that I didn’t know I had a style until a neighbor asked one year why I didn’t have any art in the local county fair. I asked how she knew that, and she said she didn’t see anything that was my style. What a surprise! A style had developed portrait by portrait, landscape by landscape, without telling me!
This post is part of a series in which readers ask questions about my life as an artist, and I answer them. Most of the posts this month will concern one of these questions. If you have a question you’d like to ask, please ask it. It’s never too late to get your burning questions answered!
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