Chester the Rooster - Pt 8 - And Still More Feathers

The more feathers I paint the more there seem to be. Over the course of the last couple of days I have pretty much completed the head, neck and chest feathers. I was quite pleased with myself till I looked back along the body and its seemingly endless supply of feathers.

These were the colors I was anticipating using during this round of painting. I ended up adding Prussian Blue, Cobalt Blue and Pthalo Green to the mix as well.

Here I feel like I have finished up the head and neck on the romance side. I'm contemplating bringing the yellow down farther though. Will mull that over.

Here I have worked on the wing, and the body feathers. the first layer is green and then blue under that,

A closer look. The wing feathers need some highlight yet.

In the front I brought the green a bit further down.

And the same level of progress on the money side.

Chester the Rooster - Pt 7 - More Feathers

Still working slowly on the head at this point. The money side of Chester's head is pretty much done, maybe some touch ups but that's about it. I worked on the front (below the peak) and on the romance side last night. Pretty rough at this point but it should only take another hour or so to get it to the "finished" point.

The money side

From the front, which also shows some of the difficulty created by the lighting conditions in the living room.

The romance side, roughed in.

Chester the Rooster - Pt 6 - Starting on the Feathers

Now the real hard part begins on Chester working on the feathers. I spent an hour working the colors down the feathers on the money side, which is the side you can get away with a few mistakes. The color change isn't to bad but it needs some more work before I shift over to the romance side. Still not bad work.

There should be four fairly distinct changes of colors in the feathers when its done. Looking at the "model" those changes occur in bands of color that can cut right through the middle of a feather which I find rather intriguing.

Chester the Rooster - Pt 4 - Body Base Colors Complete

Finally was able to finish off the rest of the Prussian Blue feathers on the romance side and managed to get a base coat of Raw Sienna on the legs. At this point all the body colors are blocked in (including those spots on the wings that started in Raw Sienna instead of Prussian Blue). Chester is ready to move on to shading and highlighting. At this point the oil colors will start to come into play so I need to find something to use as a palette and I will probably shift some of the enamels into small jars. I'll be using multiple colors at the same time and working on smaller areas. This is the point where Chester will become a real time sink. Right now I'm about 10 hours into the process, in some ways Chester has a lot more surface area to deal with because of the feathers than a carousel horse does and the horses took any where from 40 - 80 hours to complete. We will find out where Chester fits into the hourly wage scale now!

The light is just inadequate for good pictures and a flash blows out the colors. This is the romance side with the Prussian Blue finally finished.

This shot was a bit earlier in the day so I still have some west facing sun coming in. The legs now have a coat of Raw Sienna.

And a quick shot of the money side. The "horse" furniture won't be started on till the body is done. It will be a reddish leather saddle and belts with a red saddle blanket with the USMC EGA emblem in the back corners.

Carousel Rooster to the top of the que

I have shown Chester a couple of times over the years on the blog. After everything that has been going on I realized that this is probably the most important thing that I need to finish. My dad carved this one at least 10 years ago and I have had it since 2016. My mom certainly isn't getting any younger and she may soon be the only one left from her generation. While she is in excellent health I need to get this one finished for her.

It has been moved into the house (no small chore either). We have opted to do the work in the living room. Probably not the best place for a studio but it will serve the purpose. I sanded down the primer for a good painting surface and I plan on starting to get paint on him this weekend. The goal is to definitely to have him done by Thanksgiving (which is really late this year). 

We are going to go for something like this one:

This fellow was wandering around on our visit to Hawaii last year.

I'm looking forward to painting this its so very different from what I usually work on.

Carousel Horse - The Patriot

A few of you may remember that my dad carved full size carousel horses and animals as a hobby. This is the last horse that he "finished". After he passed away my mom took this up to Oregon to be painted by the dad's carving mentor Ken Means. What Ken discovered is that my dad had not actually glued all the components together so it ended up being a bit more work than expected.

After seeing what Ken did with the paint work on this one, it really makes me appreciate just how good a carver my dad was. I'm definitely considering going back and repainting a number of the horses that I worked on to get it closer to Ken's style of painting.

This style of horse is known as a flag or patriot horse since it uses and American flag and Eagle motif. I think Ken did a fantastic job bringing this one to life.

It is hard to catch the subtlety of the shading in the mane. Everything seems to be a bit washed out in the photograph. There is a lot of black and brown shading that really makes it stand out and the eagle clutching the flag is amazing. I think I learned a lot just looking at this one.

This is one of the three horses that I have painted. While I think he still pretty good (I painted this one in 2002) I think he good use some freshening up. In true carousel style I would paint over the existing work rather than stripping him down to bare wood.

Carousel Horses

I know that these are sitting in one of my many "galleries" but since it I'll be picking up a new piece to work on I thought I would bring them out front for a bit. These are full size carousel horses that were carved by my Dad and painted by me. There are another half dozen or so horses and animals in various stages of completion. He has painted one horse, a giraffe (although I did the butterfly) and a lion himself, but painting really isn't his thing. So here are the ones I have done and you can see some of the others in the background. These can be quite relaxing in some ways because I get to use a 2" house brush for most of it, for some reason a size 0 Kolinsky Sable just does not get it done.

 In this next one you can see the statue that he wants me to paint in the corner. Must be somewhere between 2' and 3' tall. The lion he painted is behind this horse, its not finished yet.

 An in process shot. I love being able to paint with a house brush.

 Hippocampus was the last one I did and that's my Dad next to it

 This is the horse my dad painted, the mane is done with gold leaf. You can see the Giraffe's neck on the edge of the picture that he painted.

 The current horse in the carving stage.