Dumpster Pony gets a New Home

I went to take my recycling out and noticed something odd in the big Dumpster. On close inspection, I found that this poor fellow was clean, dry, soft, and in perfectly good repair. He'd simply been tossed out.

My inner five-year-old was aghast. I could surely find someone who would love him, so I took him in, snapped a couple photos, and plunked him onto my Facebook page, where (to my surprise) he got more interest and comments than almost anything else I've ever posted. One friend re-named him the Velveteen Pony and another begged me to send him to her for her little granddaughters.

So Velveteen Pony will have a new life in Florida, after I draw his portrait. And I will continue dumpster-plucking without shame, because some things just shouldn't be landfill fodder.

Drawings while volunteering at the Soap Factory

Toy Lippizan, sanguine pencil, carbon pencil, Conté pencil on tan paper, 7 x 5".

Yes, I took my little Breyer horses with me to the Soap Factory.  I was tending gallery on a slow day and knew I might need something to work on.  These were fun.

Toy Morgan, sanguine pencil, carbon pencil, Conté pencil on tan paper, 7 x 5".   Usually when I use the toys as models I hide the fact that they're made of plastic.  This time I drew in some of the faint mold lines -- and then turned this one over to capture the rigidity of the pose.

Toppled Toy Horse.  7 x 4.5", carbon pencils, sanguine and Conté pencil on paper.

More brown paper drawings

Canter, top, and Narcissus Bulbs, both mixed media on Ingres paper. These were demonstrations in my drawing classes. Horse is about 9" x 12" and bulbs approx. 9" x 13".

Toy Lippizan

Mixed media on brown paper, 7" x 6.5". Sold. Click to enlarge.

Created this morning just for the enjoyment of it. The horse is a Breyer model I've had since junior high. Toys often make interesting pieces of sculpture and I enjoy working from them.

Dad's Toy Bronco

10 x 13", acrylic and pastel on paper.

This toy was made in the early 1940s in Japan, and belonged to my dad when he was little. It still works -- wind it up and the little horse bucks. This drawing is not currently for sale, and may serve as a study for an oil painting.

Toy Horses #8

Little Mare, oil on canvas, 10 x 10".

This piece languished unfinished for months and months, until the other night when I picked up my brushes and attacked it, changing the entire setting of the horse. I let some of the original red show through, and the contrast with that and the green has made me remarkably happy.

Fresh Paint!

Little Stallion. Oil on canvas, 10 x 10".



This was recently finished. Its companion piece, the Little Mare, is in progress:



This -- all dark red and brown -- is what the first one looked like in its early stages, too. It's always amazing, even to me, that I can get from here to there.

Setting up the studio

Naturally, I had to wait until after my digital camera died before deciding to start a blog.

This is because I'm slightly nuts, or maybe because I needed more incentive to go buy a new camera.

I'll be posting a lot of work in progress here, beginning in the next few days or as soon as I get a camera, whichever comes first.

Meanwhile, I'll put up a few recent works.

The drawing at left is Uncle Oscar's Appaloosa. The horse is a toy, about ten inches tall. He was given to me by my great-great-uncle, Oscar Lybass, when I was about three years old. One of my earliest memories is of him taking the horse down from a high shelf at his house -- it was all dark, warm wood in there -- and putting it in my hands.

Uncle Oscar was something like 90 years old at the time, and I don't think I ever saw him again, as he died soon afterward. The toy horse is the only thing of his that I have.

For this drawing I took a sheet of heavy paper and painted it with dark, transparent brown acrylic (acrylic is basically the same stuff as latex house paint; it's water-based but permanent when dry). Then I drew on it in charcoal, a couple colors of pastel (a dark black and a pale yellow) and some white chalk for the brightest highlights.

The brown wash gives the drawing a lot of warmth, and the brush strokes on the paper give it a great texture, like a painting.

I love this method of working very, very much. The only trouble with making art on paper is that while it's cheap to make, it's very expensive to frame. Canvases cost a lot more at the outset but are far more economical in the long run, so I work primarily in oil on canvas.