Horse portrait from Photo, Ollie

A bit of a rush commission, meet Ollie, a lovely looking horse with unusual colouring which proved a bit of a challenge. Due to it being a surprise I was unable to post any work in progress until Ollie's owner had received the portrait.

I began by drawing in the basic outline of Ollie, as this is only my second horse commission I am still a little unsure of a horse's anatomy so wanted to make sure all the muscles etc were in the correct place. At this point I used four different colours to start to get the correct colouring and depth, I had not put in high and low lights so there were to be several more layers added later.

Below you can see I moved across to Ollie's cheek, I wanted to make sure I was getting the shape of his head correct. I added a few more layers here to the original four colours, I added a darker brown, some brown black to create more shadows plus I burnished a little to start to show up the sheen on his fur. Still a long way to go at this point though.
Below I started to add a little of the black background, this made a major difference to the look of the portrait as it made Ollie's colours stand out much more, it created a really good contrast. I also worked on Ollie's ears which were very pricked and apparently a good indicator of his personality. A very alert horse by all accounts.

Unfortunately as this was such a rush job I had to take the final pictures at night time under lights, as you can see it makes a massive difference to the colours and shine of the portrait. I am reluctant to alter the colours with a photo shop type programme though as I'm not really sure how to do it for one but you can see the true colours of the portrait from the updates above. Ollie's portrait was collected very early in the morning so due to Autumn beginning to creep around the corner the light was not suitable in the morning to take a better shot anyway.

Anyway Ollie has now gone off to his owner for her birthday, back to the drawing board.