Jinty – Highland Pony – Pencil sketchI posted this on DeviantArt yesterday, then forgot to blog here too.  Whoops!

I’ve always found it harder to draw cobby type horses and ponies. When I was at school I spent hours sketching and painting dainty arabians because they just seemed to move like magical creatures. I learned to ride on Highland ponies, and adored them, but I’ve never been able to draw any of the stocky native breeds.

So, for some practice and a challenge I drew this portrait of my biggest (and certainly fattest!) Highland pony, Jinty. She’s a challenge just in the gold highlights of her mane and the dark stripes and spots on her face.  There’s a real satisfaction in making myself do something out of my comfort zone, if I get really brave I’ll draw the other side of her so I can get her full mane drawn.  I pity the 4 horses she stole hers from, I really do!

I’ve been playing around with my scanner and installed Simple Scan – it makes a lovely clean pencil scan, so I’ve just had to touch the levels and change to greyscale in Gimp.  In Jinty’s case I also moved the sketch into the centre of the paper so there’s a clear margin for framing.  But I’m much happier bringing my pencil sketches onto the PC now it’s just a quick tweak in Gimp.  No excuse for not scanning in my sketches now, and very useful when I start working on cartoons from my sketches.