Pet Portraits and Wildlife Art

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.