On my way home from work in 2021 I spotted this buckskin mare traversing a huge “open” range with several other horses on the Steptoe Highlands in Klickitat County, Washington. Mt. Hood loomed in the distance, and the smoky August evening colors made such a beautiful scene that it compelled me to paint this.
I tried something very different with this piece, and I’ll be doing more of the same—recently I had been creating with stippling in ink pen media, and I wanted to apply the same texture effects to watercolor by using a pointillist approach. The middle ground proved ideal for this technique, allowing me to retain the amount of detail I saw in the small high-desert shrubs stretching off into the distance. Years ago I experimented with a somewhat abstract watercolor by sprinkling droplets on illustration board, so I already knew those tiny drops wouldn’t “soak in” the same way they do on paper. Next time I tackle a realism painting with pointillism, I intend to render the entire image using this dot-by-dot method.
On my way home from work in 2021 I spotted this buckskin mare traversing a huge “open” range with several other horses on the Steptoe Highlands in Klickitat County, Washington. Mt. Hood loomed in the distance, and the smoky August evening colors made such a beautiful scene that it compelled me to paint this.
I tried something very different with this piece, and I’ll be doing more of the same—recently I had been creating with stippling in ink pen media, and I wanted to apply the same texture effects to watercolor by using a pointillist approach. The middle ground proved ideal for this technique, allowing me to retain the amount of detail I saw in the small high-desert shrubs stretching off into the distance. Years ago I experimented with a somewhat abstract watercolor by sprinkling droplets on illustration board, so I already knew those tiny drops wouldn’t “soak in” the same way they do on paper. Next time I tackle a realism painting with pointillism, I intend to render the entire image using this dot-by-dot method.
