Mural Panel update

My panel for the Le Cadeau du Cheval Mural is coming along nicely. I'll post two installments here...I'm working pretty quickly on this, and I didn't have a chance to post a new blog entry in between, so you can see the early stage of the painting and how it has progressed. The first image, I have included an image of the original panel next to it, so that you can squint your eyes at the image and see how the shapes and the tones fit into the original. This has been an extreme challenge. The only horse I have a decent reference for is the big bucskin in the middle. The others are pretty much made-up out of my head.



In this latest installment, I've refined the anatomy of the horses a bit more. The ear on the grey looks a little small to me, so I'll probably adjust that. I've used the forelocks and manes of the two middle horses to create the dark lines in the composition. This is a departure from my usual work in which I'm concerned with strong light and shadows. With no strong light source, the horses are looking a bit flat, but I can't get too contrasty with the light, or I'll lose the original overall shape.
The mural page has had a few new pieces added. Check out the progress here: http://www.muralmosaic.com/Cadeau.html

The Horse Gift Mural

Le Cadeau du Cheval "The Horse Gift" Mural is a collaborative mural project in which individual artists each paint a panel from a large mother image. I am thrilled to be a part of a project like this, and I'll start posting my progress today.
I was able to choose which panels I preferred. Of my top three choices, it seems that I got my first choice. Some panels were fairly monochromatic, some had lots of pinks and purples, and some had definite shapes and edges. I wanted to challenge myself with a panel that had definitive shapes, and it certainly is a challenge to find an image that will maintain the values and contrast in the right places. I chose the panel I did because I immediately saw something in the image. Of course when I received the actual panel in the mail, I decided to do something entirely different.
Above is the original panel I recieved. At first all I could see was a big white horse rear-end in the lower right corner. And I thought of perhaps an appaloosa or pinto horse, rear view, looking to the left. But the shape in the middle was too rounded and big to be the right proportion for that idea, so I worked out a cluster of heads that work themselves into the shapes.


I think I'm ready to start painting. I'll post the progress as it goes along.
To see the whole Cadeau du Cheval mural in progress, go to: http://muralmosaic.com/Cadeau.html
To see other mural mosaics, http://muralmosaic.com/