Artwork in Paintings and Pencil

Morning Light was a search and rescue mission. Before starting the drawing, I went on a photo excursion to a friend’s nearby pasture where he kept several mares with foals. The sun had just peeked over the mountain when I got there, and the horses were bathed in the warm light. Moving around them, I began taking photos of the moms and babies while they watched with mild curiosity and continued grazing. When I passed this mare and her foal, she turned toward me, her foal pressed tightly against her. They were standing in front of a dark hedge of shrubby trees, their coats highlighted by the early light. I snapped a photo of them and moved on, not realizing until later this would be one of the best photos I took that day. 

I decided to draw a closely cropped composition of the mare and foal, with dramatic lighting and shadows that emphasized the mare’s protective stance and the foal’s curiosity. The problem was, I finished the foal’s head and wondered if I should have done a painting instead. It bothered me so much that I stopped working on the drawing and taped it to the wall, where somehow it stayed for the next two years! 

I liked it enough that I didn’t throw it away, but there it sat until a few months ago when I took another look at it and decided it was worth finishing, if only because that little foal was so cute and deserved to be completed. Drawing the fuzzy coat of the foal proved to be more challenging than I’d expected. But my goal was to make him look soft and touchable, as foals are, so I pressed on. 

I reworked the background, using both pencil and charcoal to create the deep shadows there and on the mare. Then I tackled the mare’s head, working back and forth on the drawing, using all my tools to pull out the light areas and emphasize the drama of the darks. 

Now that the eye was done, the rest of the composition was mostly in dark shadow. Nothing gets a deep black like charcoal, but it is grainy and not very smooth to work with. Dark pencil has an annoying sheen. So I combined them and made up a system that allowed me to have the best of both. 

Finishing Up

As the dark areas were filled in I could see what I wanted to accomplish taking shape. I pushed the pencil and charcoal back and forth, creating the suggestion of muscle and shadow until it said “finished!”

And here is the final result:

Morning Light by Annette Randall, 2022

17 x 19 " Pencil and Charcoal

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