Rose, Art and Sunflower Designs

I drew This little horse this morning in colored pencils to further explore some rose designs for next years horses.

 It resides in my my sketchbook along with some photos of other horses that I've made over the last few years.

This page in my sketchbook started with 2 photos of a wooden horse that I did a few years ago and I thought I'd explore elements of the design in watercolor and pencil as I think about what sorts of variations of the ideas that I'd like to carve up and paint next summer.

A New Blue Horse

I'm doing most of my designing on paper these days as I prefer to do the woodcarving and sanding outdoors in the summertime.

If I like the designs enough they'll make it to actual wooden horses. If not they just decorate my mail of sit in a sketchbook.

Either way, even unsuccessful designs entertain people and keep me creating.

A peek at the sketchbook

 It's a bit hard to make it out here but I'm breaking down a design I did a couple of years ago in wood and doing the sunflowers in watercolor and I started doing another horse covered with paintbrushes and pencils as a pencil drawing.

I've got a lot of work to do with it and will add the other images as I go along.

I felt the green around the sunflowers wasn't dark enough to provide a contrast so I'll be working over those areas in watercolor pencil.

The important thing is that  I plan to do all of my design work over the winter so that I'll be ready to settle down and make them in wood next summer.

Sunflower Artist Dala Horse

 Sketch your design on the horse in pencil. Here I used paintbrushes, pencils and sunflowers. 

Paint with acrylic paints 

Clear Coat with Polyurethane adding many thin coats until you get the look that you want. I use a satin finish but you can make your own choices about what you like to use.

Christmas Dala Horse

Sports Theme Dala Horse

As you can see, I designed this a few years ago for a kid that was doing both Soccer and American Football but you could customize the design for whatever sport or activity means the most to you.

MATERIALS:

Wooden Horse

Acrylic Paints-

Black

White

brown

green 

yellow 

pencil

 1.sketch your design on both sides of the horse in pencil.
 2. Begin to paint in you shapes
 3. For the grassy area, base coat in in black and brown
     (you want to give the illusion of soil)
 4. Work the grass over the base coat with a liner brush
     and green paint, adding a bit of yellow from time to time to
     get different shades of green as you add all of the little blades of grass.
                                          4a. be sure that bits of the "dirt" peek through,
                                                it will make the grass stand out.

Yellow Horses

New Ways to Use My Old Dala Horse Designs

While going through my old files I came across this horse that I'd designed when I first started out. I decided what should have been added at the time and made some notes of how I'd like it painted next year.

  
As long as I had it out I thought I'd experiment with how it would look done up in a range of other colors. I plan to try each of them next year and see which one I like best.

I don't remember if this design ever went to the stage of being painted on a wooden horse or not so I've noted the changes that I wan't to make and will paint one up next year.

Here are some color variations to try for that design too.

The reason that I keep saying that I'll try them next year is because I've been trying to keep all of the carving and painting outdoors and the weather has actually been cold enough that it tried to snow here a couple of days ago.

Not Just Another Red Horse

A lot of design elements are common to most horses. It's your selection of these and ability to mix them that makes each horse different. Variations on a theme that make your designs sing. You can stay true to your roots and express yourself at the same time which is one of my favorite things about Dala Horses and why I hope it will ignite a passion in you too.

Summer Rose Design

I designed this one in watercolor and liked the look of it so I spent today carving and sanding 2 different horse shapes to see how the design works out on wood. I'll post results as soon as I finish them.

As fall sets in this design is my farewell to summer.

Sunflower Ornament

Sometimes you just want to try something different. This year in the garden my Sunflowers did great and improved the bird watching as goldfinches and black capped chickadees sat on top of them while they pulled the seeds out.

That was the inspiration for this little ornament.

 I may play with this design further by changing whether or not I outline it and what color I would do that in. Next I'll experiment with other background colors. Keep following the blog to see which approach I'll take next.

Trying other finishes

I liked this horse but worried that it might be too bright to fit into some peoples decor so tried to soften and antique it. I still can't decide whether I ruined it or not. What do you think?

An Assortment of Dala Horse Shapes

With this group I was experimenting with different shapes of horses in the same range of colors.

Setting up your work area to carve and sand horses

 While I still do most of the work by hand I do find various rotary tools helpful for reaching into places that sandpaper doesn't  go.

I try to take advantage of good weather to keep all of the wood chips and sawdust out of the house.
It's also nice to be able to work out in the fresh air whenever possible.

It's also nice to make yourself an area indoors to store and display your finished horses so that you can enjoy the results of all of your hard work.

Making a Scrapbook or Design Page in Your Sketchbook

As I finish each wooden horse these days I take photos from every angle and paste them in my scrapbook so that I can analyze which parts of the design I like and what changes I'd like to make.
In this case  I used watercolors to paint bits of the design elements in different sizes to explore them further.

Five Different Red Dala Horse Designs

I still don't have a workshop or studio up and running so I need to do my carving, sanding and clear coating out doors. Living in Minnesota limits the amount of time that I'm able to do that so my Dala Horse Season is a short one.

Here's an assortment of this years designs.

 My favorite thing to show people here is that I never do the same thing twice. Of the five red horses in this shot, no two are alike.

As you can see it's a nice place to work, dappled sunshine and a light breeze make it comfortable most of the day.

I'm going to miss this over the long, long winter's we have here.

Rattvik Style

There are many Swedish painting styles. Many of them are reserved for certain types of projects. Rattvik was used on furniture in the 1700's and I wondered why in the hundreds of years since then that no one ever though"what would happen if I adapted it to horses?". The nearly monochromatic color palatte and easy border patterns fit with many of today's decorating styles and mix well with other ethnic designs.

This is my first attempt at working in this style. I need to do further experiments for the proper shade of greyish white and stained, grained background but I find the early results encouraging.

 The white dots on black were not part of my research but seemed to go well with the rest of it.

 I'm looking forward to developing these designs further.

I even incorporated pictures of my horse on my inspiration pages to spin together with a few other ideas simmering on the back burner right now.

I wonder how many other people have considered blending Swedish  and Native American patterns and ideas together? The results should be interesting.

I'm having fun filling in other bits of the page in pencil and ink. It will be fun to see where it leads.