Impressionistic Horse, A Painting A Day 10.26.08

I painted this bay mare as part of a equine painting challenge on http://www.wetcanvas.com/ , a forum for artists. The idea is to do painting exercises as a way to grow and learn. In this case the painter was Munnings and the painting is his Bay Mare was used as an example. Its quite humbling to set a master painter up as your own standard but also a great learning experience. One of the things I hope to accomplish is to be more fluid in my painting and what I liked here was having the horses as part of an environment rather than it just being a painting of a horse. These exercises are also done in short periods of time which pushes you to be more efficient with brush strokes. I am enjoying exploring a looser style of painting which I hope to further develop as time goes on.

I am working in oils so in the photo above the paint is still quite wet and creates a glare. I apologize for the poor quality image but with this exercise the idea is to paint a painting a day and move on. This was done in a bout 1 to 1 1/2 hours. Later on, some of these maybe used as a study for a larger more complete painting.

You can see my finished work at http://www.suesteiner.com