This is the basis for my latest piece. It's a great capture of a harness racehorse, a pacer, being fast worked on a home track. It's a lovely image, nicely focused on the bay Standardbred and his driver. The light is good and the sun is reflecting off the horse's coat and his black hopples. He is in full stride, filling the loops as he paces at speed.

The driver has a firm but kind hold on the reins and he is shifting his weight in the gig, to help his charge balance as they work in the solid track work sulky. The horse is prick eared, listening to his driver and soft on the bit. He is obviously clean gaited and does not wear boots.

Lovely base for what I want to do. I'm going to create a digitally rendered pencil and charcoal sketch using Adobe Photoshop CC2014. The clean lines of the image make it a good subject for this.

It's mostly a matter of duplicating the image several times and applying a number of adjustment layers and filters, and then tweaking the settings a touch. I added a highlight layer just to bring the horses coat out. Love the dapples! I was well pleased with the result. I think it will look wonderful in a dark frame.

Of course, I can't help but play a bit more and decided that I might like to turn it into a coloured Watercolour. Back to Photoshop I go and after a bit of brushing and fiddling with the light and colours, out came the image at the begining of this blog. Below is a bigger version.

His bay coat fairly glows in the sun. This would look fabulous as a 30 x 24 inch Canvas wrap. Both the pencil sketch and the watercolour are available for purchase in a number of sizes from the Gallery.

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