Progress: Fred

This is the project that those Franz Marc studies were for. I'm moving a little more slowly with this than I would like – it just hasn't been my week. I was down with a cold, bounced back for an unexpectedly social weekend, and then went down with a 36 hour migraine. These things I could seriously do without!

However, progress has been made, so I thought I'd post some pics:

Here's the final approved outline-and-colour study. I don't often have such detailed colour studies, but since this is as unfamiliar style, I wanted to get all my experimenting done in Photoshop, and give myself a detailed guide for the final piece.

I chose to put a detailed ink-work portrait of Fred The Horse on the right, as it's not really possible to draw any one specific horse in Franz Marc's style and this is supposed to be a portrait of Fred. I based the pose of the background Fred on one of the horses in Marc's 1911 painting The Large Red Horses, to get a properly Marc-like feel.

For those interested in the hideous-ness of my thumbnails, this was the original concept. 

The Stages So Far:

I removed the colour layers from my study and printed out the linework on two pieces of A4 (after first altering the position of the background horse's legs, which were bothering me) paper to give me a ~35 x 22cm copy to trace, and cut out an appropriately sized piece of Bristol Board.

Traced the outlines using my lightbox, and then refined them.

Completed most of the inking (until I got tired with it, and decided to play around with some colour for a while =P) with Carbon Black Atelier waterproof drawing ink, a small brush, and a dip pen. 

And started adding the first of the colour.

What you see here is a combination of Winsor & Newton and Reeves watercolours and Prismacolour pencils. 

About 7.5 hour so far.