Day 2 World Watercolor Month.
This is an American draft horse breed that is also a color breed. This is a mix of watercolor and gouache.

There is a challenge going on called World Watercolor Month. There is a list of prompts and all that but you aren’t required to use the list. I haven’t done this challenge in previous years but since I am in the middle of working on a project that is a mix of watercolor and gouache, I figured I would post these for the Watercolor month.
I like to do self inflicted challenges. They are good for keeping me in the creative mode. The latest is going back to my roots and creating some horses. I used to draw and paint horses all of the time when I was young. I had a little handbag I would carry with me that had my “herd” in it. I can’t believe I shlepped my tiny Breyer stablemates and other horses around with me and they are still Live Show Quality to this day. The reason why I stopped drawing horses and segued into plein air and other art is because I didn’t want to be pigeon holed doing one thing. I never regretted that decision and the many, many years of painting plein air and sketching on location has made me a much more diverse and versatile artist.
I am not sure I’ll be posting horses every day. These take a while, but I will be posting something with watercolor, even if I am out “guerrilla” sketching.
Today’s horse is a Morgan. The first one I did in my sketchbook. I picked the Morgan Horse since it is the first breed of horse that was created in the United States. The Morgan Horse breed came from one stallion, “Figure,” or “Justin Morgan’s horse. From that one stallion, we have horses like the Standardbred, American Saddlebred and other American breeds. You can read a story about this horse in a book by Marguerite Henry called “Justin Morgan had a Horse.” It’s a children’s book with wonderful illustrations by Wesley Dennis. I still have my original book.
On my Zoom call today with Mike Lowery, we had to decide on what prompt to draw. Someone suggested a frog. We have frogs all over the place, here. When my husband and I go for our morning walk, we have to dodge these tiny little frogs. You can barely see them. One morning there were hundreds of them and my husband remarked about the quantity. I said it was just logical, there needed to be so many babies because of how many get eaten or suffer some other ill fate.
So of course, my idea of “frog” is “egret chow.” The egrets (herons and ibis) stroll around the neighborhood, scarfing up frogs and lizards, and whatever else they find edible.
My sketch of frog was more of an egret and a frog hiding from the egret.
I pulled the sketch into Procreate and then tweaked it:
The frog needs to find a better hiding spot.
I did this little pattern for the 3×3 Challenge. The Theme was on the farm and I had a lot of fun with this one.
I started by randomly drawing chickens in my sketchbook. When I had a page I scanned the page into my computer, then I air dropped it to my iPad. From there, I tweaked some chickens, removed the ones that were so so, and added a few embellishments,
I used one of the suggested color palettes, which something I normally don’t do, but I figured it would make trying to choose colors less stressful. LOL I only had to add two colors that I thought would work better. I hope you enjoy this as much as I had fun doing it.
Also, a warning this evening. There are some really mean people in this world and it is a shame that some of these bad people have to make life miserable for others. All I have to say about that is Karma is a bitch and what you do to others will come back at you much, much worse. For the people who hacked my daughter’s Instagram account, Karma will find you. My daughter is a good sweet person and didn’t deserve that. WHAT YOU DO TO OTHERS WILL ALWAYS COME BACK TO YOU.
Here is the message that she received from someone she knew who was hacked as well. They sent the same one to me and my family from my daughter’s account. Beware of people DM’ing you with a link or something like this. Be careful out there, dear followers.
I am taking Mike Lowery’s workshop “Getting Paid to Draw” and on our Zoom call, we were given the task to draw a horse on bike while he did his lesson.
This is my horse on a wobbly bike. This is untouched except that I removed my notes around it. I might take this one further.
PS, this is a good class!
The story of Florencia is also about a time machine. Part 2 of the assignment for Florencia is to create a toy to go with the story. This is my toy proposal.
I had a bunch of ideas about the time machine. No specifics were given so we could do whatever we wanted. I thought of tree houses, boxes, blankets covering furniture, and so forth, but in the end, I went for some more like a spacecraft.
This is a page spread for the character I posted yesterday, created by Zoe Tucker. The character, Florencia, is a time traveler and her current mission is to bring back the last surviving dodos. We had to do a spread with just that little bit of info.
Here’s mine interpretation of when the two “explorers” first land on the island (dodos lived on an island) and they are looking for the dodos….
You must be logged in to post a comment.