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Murasaki99 — Outlaw Trail Portrait
Published: 2012-05-27 06:11:34 +0000 UTC; Views: 976; Favourites: 39; Downloads: 7
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Description
And here is the same portrait in full color as seen in sepia here:
This and the sepia version are for the HARPG Outlaw Trail ride and contest. The color version is a bonus for extra credit. 
#HARPG-Outlaw-Trail
Rider: Saki Harusame
Horse: Black Velvet and Lace (Blackie to his friends)
Saki's gear: loosely based on Colonel Mortimer's kit from "A Fistful of Dollars". Boots are not your standard Western boots, but more a cavalry boot.
Blackie's gear: bridle is a traditional horsehair bosal with fiador, saddle is a modified Civil War era McClellan cavalry saddle with center-hung stirrups.
~~o0-------------------------------------------0o~~
This painting took a couple days of thought to figure out the pose and elements, the lines were done in sepia brushmarker. [link]
Colors are a mix of traditional and digital and include watercolor pencils, watercolor, ArtRage, and Paint Shop Pro. Sepia processing done in PSP.
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Comments: 33
The combination of traditional and digital techniques is very neat, and I love all the tack details! Great artwork
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Thankies! I was experimenting with a number of different techniques for this, but I really do like combining traditional with digital. Now if only I could actually figure out how to do proper vector lines...
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I love your characters! (:
Would you mind if I featured them in one of my pictures? C:
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I'd be honored!! And I'd love to return the favor!!
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Amazing, thanks!
That would be awesome (:
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Hi,may i use these two in my next outlaw trail pic?i udnerstand if you say no ^^
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Yes you can.
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Such pretty colours 
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Thankies! Blackie here could pass as one of your elf-horses. He's black and white and Anglo-Arabian in body build. And very smart, which is a good thing. 
And that black color on his body is from a kid's set of watercolors by Prang - the "black" is a funky stuff that is never the same color twice and breaks up into purples and blues as you work with it while it is wet. Lots of fun, if you don't mind the fact that some of the color will be purely random.
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Haha that sounds pretty! Perfect if colour is what you're actually going for. 
He completely could 
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Woots, thanks much! I can't wait to hit the trail... although first I have to finish the arrival pic.
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Yep I saw your an outlaw, good luck
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Bwa-ha-ha! Look out world!!
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Thankies! It was so much fun to do. 
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Methinks I am, and I am so excited about it. 8D
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wow, this is soo awesome!
Super jealous of your traditional skills? yes.
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Thank you kindly - the characters were done with the brushmarker and watercolors, the background is digital - but ArtRage really makes stuff look like traditional media. I always worry a bit about ruining the character's colors when painting in the background, so this takes away that worry, for the most part. Then the only worry is getting the two images combined in a way that looks reasonable.
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Brushmarker?
Haha, yep. I totally get that. i alwaaays mess up when making my background and it makes my characters look horrible.
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Yes indeed, I use a fine-line brushmarker for my outline inks and some for a little spot-color on some pieces. In this one the brushmarker was only for the outlines, the rest of the color was watercolor and watercolor pencil. If you can find the, Prismacolor makes nice brushmarkers for inking, as does Marvy LaPlume, or Tombo. Way back when, I used to use a fine brush and India ink. That always gives a lovely line.
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Ooh, okay. I usually use ballpoint pen for outlining because I'm usually too impatient to start colouring xD Ballpoint doesn't smear, which is unlike all of my other pens. But I'll try it! Your lines look super pretty!
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Very nice! I can't differentiate between traditional and digital.
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That's so cool -- I thought the blend turned out fairly subtle, but I wasn't at all sure it would be that way at first. The background is 97% produced in ArtRage, which is incredibly good at simulating traditional media. I don't use it often enough, but this little RPG/contest/interactive story will hopefully raise my game with it. 
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The horse's color is really attractive and rich. Its surface has a rich, pearly iridescent luster of light hues that I really like.
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Thank you kindly -- I can't claim total credit for the base color, it is partly due to the watercolor I was using. It is from a student's (actually a child's) set of watercolors by a company called Prang. The colors are nontoxic and for some reason the formula for black is amazingly random and fun to work with wet. It tends to break up into blues and purples, and then it makes blooms of color when you blend it with brushmarkers or other watercolors. So I used that black for the under-painting, then went over it with lighter and darker tones to give it shine and shadow. So my "secret technique" for Blackies' base color is Prang watercolors [link]
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Amazing how various mediums can turn out to have many different pleasant effects.
Well, thanks to the Prang watercolor set you now have a new color style to your credit.
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Now that I see it in color, I realize how awesome that horse is
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Thankies! I heard a really good artist once say "black horses are never black" -- by which she meant that a shiny black horse tends to reflect all the colors around him. I tried to think about that as I worked in the landscape and went back to put some of the earth-and-sky shine on his body.
Also, the black watercolor I used for the initial washes on Blackie's body is a student color from Prang and it tends to break up into other colors, which makes working with it wonderfully unpredictable.
I had a Paint mare when I was a kid who went in a bosal hackamore for years. Someone had trained her to neck rein and she was so good at it. I never owned a McClellan saddle, but local folks still use modern versions for the trail. I ended up with a western-tree endurance saddle for my NSH mare - it looked mostly like a standard western saddle only it had no saddle-horn and the girth and stirrup rigging were set up for centered riding.
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That's a very true say, black horses really do tend to reflect every color around them 
Uu kinda reminds me of my black ink, it too breaks in countless shades of color.
Sounds like a very comfortable saddle, I've always wanted to try western style. But so far the only saddles I've ever been on were English. I'm also hoping to try out the wooden Mongolian saddle as well.
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