Cloncurry River Crossing

This is a painting I completed over the Christmas period, it is something that I have been wanting to paint for a while but knew I would need several days where I could get stuck into it, so Christmas was a good time, no pressure to get it done. 

I was given a bunch of photos of a large mob of mares and foals crossing the Cloncurry River some time ago. As with many of my paintings I have combined several photos to arrive at a final composition.

So that was the first step..to decide what I was going to paint, the next step was to start sketching.

I often us a grid when I am sketching so it is quicker and easier to get the proportion right, however this time I just went freehand, I wasn't worried about the size, it is much easier to sketch big, I will put everything together in the right proportions in Photoshop latter.

Once I had the main horse sketches complete I photographed and took them into Photoshop, here I combined them to match the original photos and adjusted their size so the perspective was right. This is what it looked like in Photoshop.

This is how the horses will be positioned, the right hand group are coming out of some deep water and the other ones are going around it. This is going to be a large painting, almost a metre wide. After I transferred this to the canvas the first thing to do was an under painting, which is basically a rough painting without detail and highlights.

In the under painting you can see that the horses don't have a lot of detail in them and the background, especially the grass bank needs more work. Also the water has just roughly been painted in.

Here I am putting in detail, being a large painting it did take quite a bit of time. You will notice that I have a tablet beside the painting as my guide and reference, this is a great thing to have as it lets me zoom right in on any detail etc. You will also notice that I have turned the foal behind the depth indicator around so it is coming into the painting, but one thing I decided that I did not like was the mare behind that foal heading out of the painting to the left. So in the next photo you will see that I have painted a horse coming straight on, which fixes that issue.

The water was a bit of a challenge and compositionally I almost decided to make cut some of the bottom of the painting off because I felt there was to much empty space there but I have decided to leave it in, the painting is about a flooded river so I think it adds to the drama. Talking about drama, I did add some storm clouds into the background to make things look a little more threatening.

And that's the end product. I hope you enjoyed that insight the story about creating this painting.

Cheers and kind regards

Mark