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Out of my comfort zone
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Message
Posted
I’m so far out of my comfort zone I think I will need a space ship to get back.
I have always love horses , to the sleek racing type but the big heavy working ones. As six years old back in the fifties I was often seen riding on the plough horses belonging to the farm near the RAF camp we lived on in Germany.
I managed to get adopted by the local farmer when living in France as a ten year old. I love paintings of horses but have never really tried to do a serious painting of one , until yesterday that is. I was promoted to do so by a comment from Sylvia about a sketch of a horse I had done . Long story short I decided to give it a go and I have not felt this nervous about doing a painting in years.
Initial sketch and some details of the eye. I always start with the eyes on animals is it brings the sketch to life . Comments from you horse lovers and owners are very welcome as are tip etc. 
Posted
Managed a bit more , I’m now very definitely out of the comfort zone. I felt fairly safe around the eyes but it’s a different thing adding the colours to build up the water body shape or in this case the face features . I don’t want to overwork it and want washes to determine the shape and structure . I spent a couple of hours looking at horse anatomy to get more of a feel for the body structure etc. 
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by Paul (Dixie) Dean
Posted
Looking good. As for the 'why do we stress ourselves out?' - don't know, but we do: I still do, even after all these years. There are times when I think I've forgotten everything I've ever learned - certainly times when I fear I'm going to 'ruin it: I will: I know I will!'. Thing to remember though is that OK and you might ruin it - on the other hand a) you can always start again, b) even in watercolour you can salvage a picture from disaster.
Act fast to counter immediate and obvious errors or disasters; but if it's not a case of, e.g., rapidly removing a wash of the wrong colour because you picked up the wrong brush or contaminated a mix on the palette inadvertently, get up, go and make a pot of tea, take a walk in the garden, have a nap. Nine times out of ten you'll see what needs to be done when you come back to your painting: and possibly, what needs to be done is - nothing. So you can just move on and keep developing the picture.
I think it's always instructive to look at Rupert Cordeux's watercolours - if it were you or me, we'd probably assiduously and carefully remove all the pencil work, niggle away at individual bits of the picture that might not be fully resolved. Rupert certainly doesn't worry a bit about his pencil work - it seems to embarrass some of us if we leave obvious signs of it, but his paintings are such that every mark contributes to the structure; and if there are passages which might seem unresolved to us in our own work, they don't matter in his because unless you really try to analyse them you just don't notice them at all; again, they're all part of an overall structure.
This is why Alan Bickley's advice to work on the WHOLE painting is so important - why you need to stand back from your work and not obsess over one corner of it. Final details, finishing touches, are just that - to be left to the end, to round the painting off if it needs that. I run on, as per usual, but add - if you work this way, leaving your small and fine-pointed brushes to the end, painting big shapes, seeing the whole picture and not isolated bits of it: it's actually much easier to do and you're far less likely to 'ruin it' because the marks you make have contributed to the whole - this approach encourages us to think holistically - and gives us the best chance of pulling the damn' thing off without making a pig's ear of it, in short.