Touch the Sky

Finally, a proper painting! Woohoo! I saw Brave recently a really liked it. Cue fanart of Merida and Angus.

 Here's the sketch. I altered it quite a bit, because Merida looked too large for the horse. I initially drew this on an A5 sketchbook, then used a photocopier to make it A3 size: I did most of the alterations on the A3.

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 I did the background first, mostly using a mix of Payne's grey, cadmium yellow and lemon yellow, with a little scarlet and crimson thrown in. I wanted a very subtle sunrise.

 Merida's hair was a lot of fun to paint: just a mix of vermillion, orange made of cadmium yellow, yellow ochre, sienna and scarlet, and some burnt sienna for shading. I also used aquarelles.

 The horse took forever. I needed at least 9 coats of paint to get such as deep shade of black. The black is made of Payne's grey and a very dark brown paint.

 The grass in the foreground was last. I used every shade of green on the palette, plus a few that I'd mixed. I didn't define every blade of grass, because I wanted it to look a bit loose.

Here's the scanned image. It didn't really capture the colours of the original image: they're much more subdued in real life.