I like to let a painting evolve as I paint it, rather than planning everything out in detail before I start. This is not to say that I start painting without an idea of what I'm trying to do; rather it's that I don't stick to it rigorously as I go along if I find that something else is working.
When I started this painting, I intended it to be a follow-up painting to this painting of a zebra. Since I'd declared that painting finished, my mind had been pondering on other things I might have done with it. I also wanted to try quite a different background, one with a feeling of the sun baking the ground. But what had been intended to be the underpainting turned into an intriguing glazed white that I found myself wanting to keep, rather than hiding under zebra stripes. So then the question became, could a zebra become a horse?
The painting was done using acrylic paints on canvas (36x24" / 91x61cm). The colors used were titanium white, titanium buff, cadmium orange, transparent pyrrole orange, cerulean blue, Prussian blue, and bone black. The brush I used was my favorite bristle-hair filbert.
