Continuing with the speed drawings – and finishing up my ‘horse-theme’ for the time being, here is a charcoal drawing of Horse Jockey’s.

For this picture I searched for quite a while to find a source that had an angle and set-up that I had in mind. I removed all other elements from the photo that I was working from. This was the hardest part – as there were about three other horses mixed in with these two featured horses. It becomes a science to figure out which horses feet belong to which horse as they all tend to look the same.

When using an image to base a drawing from, it isn’t just copying to me. Sure, I try to draw things as realistically as possible, and usually I’m using multiple photo’s to build up a scene. There is nothing new to this. In the Renaissance Period even the Master’s had reference books that were filled with images drawn by other artists. In high school we used illustration books – which were fileld with ‘stuff’ – everything and anything – as a reference for artists to use. These would have been used for advertisers in the days before the internet. Of course, when I’m using an image I’m not merely stealing it for myself. I touch it up, make it my own. I have my own ideas of how I’d like colours, contrast, cropping, and other elements to look like. Prior to finding this landscape of horses, I was looking for multiple pictures that I could combine and draw together – if I hadn’t found one with the horses legs in the right motioning-position. As well, there is a certain angle I wanted my horses to be running at. Here, it’s not quite flat sideways, but slightly on an angle. This allows me to give more information on the jockey’s profiles and show off the clothes that they are wearing. And spot sunlight off of the chest of the horses.

I touch these images up a little on photoshop before I post them. Only because I don’t have a scanner handy for my to work with the size of paper that I use. When taking photographs of artwork, you get minor discrepancies between how the original looks and how it looks on the computer. Here I tried to clean the image and return it to its normal form as much as possible. However, I’ve lost a bit of detail in the dirt-kickup, and the chests of the horses are brighter than in my drawing. Besides that I would say I’ve managed to get it quite close to the original. Eventually I’ll have them professionally digitized, but until then – here is how it looks:

CHARCOAL