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.