NaMoPaiMo Day 8

      NaMoPaiMo is not a competition. What it is is a personal painting challenge. Can you paint a horse in the space of 28 days from start to finish? Can you make the time, get through the primer/paint issues that pop up? Can you deal with broken things and repairs? My horse's tail snapped off the first day I was working on him. I glued it back on, and then clearly have not done anything else to it. I still might, I own tiny prepping tools and could fix it so it looks nicer. But currently my focus is putting paint on the model. Or in this case, pastels. 

     Every horse goes through an ugly stage. This stage discourages a lot of new painters. I am still a fairly new painter, but I am very familiar with the ugly stage. Dolls go through an ugly stage from almost the beginning until they finally come together at the end. You just need to trust the process. There are days that that is harder than others. And when your horse looks like this, it can be a challenge. 

     But, for me, NaMoPaiMo is about trying new things. Stretching myself a bit. I don't paint often, usually I finish a horse during NaMoPaiMo, and then maybe 2-3 others shortly after. Then I get super busy again, recover from the painting bug, and don't do much of anything with the horses until the next NaMoPaiMo. It's how I roll. 

      So for my little crazy horse I decided to experiment. I threw a layer of metallic gold on him. Over the colors he already had on. Then I thought, that was fun, let's add some metallic copper. So I did. And I think he looks pretty cool! He definitely needs some more shading, but I really love the metallics. I have a couple of horses in a metallic basecoat that I might need to find time to work on soon. 

       So I spent a couple of hours playing with pastels and adding layers to my horse. I used Sara Gifford's shading guide (love that thing!) and added blended colors to the horse, and all of a sudden he came together in a way that I am pretty proud of. Of course he looks MUCH nicer in person and not in iPhone photos. I am setting him aside for now and will see how I like him with fresh eyes some other day. Then, if I still like the color and shading, I can get some details done on him. Poor guy needs eyes!

     School has been challenging, as you know. I just have so much to do and not nearly enough time to do it. I really enjoyed putting everything aside to do some painting. I didn't think about doll work that I need to do, it will get done, sooner or later. I didn't think about the struggles I have with my classes. I am not there, I don't have to think about that at the moment. All I thought about this afternoon was how fun it would be to put this or that color on the horse just to see what would happen. And I thought about what Jennifer said to me at the beginning of NaMoPaiMo. That chestnut is a hard but she has faith in me. You know what? I have faith in me too. I can do cool things like teach kids and make tiny horses chestnut. And I can do a pretty good job of both of them.