Fire And Ice: The Power Of a Warm And Cool Palette

Introduction 

Arbitrarily painting model horses is one thing and matching an actual coat color in paint is quite another. See, I had always simply painted happenstance before — I just took a cue from a reference and painted “inspired by it” rather than literally from it. In this way, I sorta painted on the fly. It was interpretive, it was loose, it was loosey goosey, and it was just what I did. Lemme tell ya though, once you start painting literally, once you have to actually match a real coat color for color, everything changes. But it changes for the better, in a big way, especially if you’re retraining your Eye. So to say I was caught off guard by this unexpected lesson is an understatement, but to say I was stunned is simply being at a loss for words! I was flabbergasted! Why? Because a huge revelation was found in this matchy-matchy exploration, one that has shifted not only the way I paint but the way I perceive horse color forever. So in the spirit of spreading the love, let’s talk about this discovery because it may be something you find immensely curious and helpful, too! So let’s just jump right in!… 

The Illumination 

It’s been the same mantra I’ve heard over and over again in classes, workshops, and seminars during my formative arting years: Pick either a warm palette or cool palette to paint with and stick with it because it makes for a more cohesive, better painting. But this just never sat well with me, and for reasons I couldn’t ever put a finger on. It just didn’t seem right to my mind but contrived and forced, artificial, even arbitrary. I didn’t buy into it. Yet after over thirty years of arting later, I finally understand why I didn’t agree: Nature just doesn’t work that way! No, Nature doesn’t pick a warm or cool palette to colorize anything — it mixes them up! Color is just color! It doesn’t care one wit about color harmonies and it’s been such a revelation to realize that I don’t have to either! 

How did I finally come to this realization? Why, it was through Heather Bullach’s online painting classes were we worked to match a real-life coat color in oil paint because when you have to nail your target reference spot on, the equation totally flips. It just forces certain issues to the fore and demands a new way of interpreting what you’re doing, and in that new relationship with color, revelations are born. How so? Well, needs must, right? That’s to say, needing to pinpoint specific hues using color theory quickly revealed that I couldn’t do that properly unless I factored in both warm and cool colors on the same horse. I discovered that in Nature there was no such thing as a warm or cool palette — there was just color — and Nature plays around with it as a child plays with tinker toys, interchangeably and eagerly. And I should, too! Enlightenment! 

If I was to paint realistically then, I had to use color realistically, too. I had to dump arbitrary human rules to instead adopt Nature’s broader example of using both warm and cool colors on my horse. Once this was revealed, I soon found that nearly all horse color is indeed a combination of both warm and cool. Now, yes, there are exceptions, of course. Nature is Nature after all. Even so, the takeaway here is that this warm and cool combination is far more common than we might think because once you start looking for it, you find it darn near everywhere. Even a grey or a grulla can be a combination! The shifts can be bold or subtle and everything in between, too, and can shift in the same body region or across regions — it’s a free for all out there! 

Overall then, there are no real rules when it comes to color use and Nature — Nature just does what it does. And so must I, taking my cue from unexpected, always-surprising, always variable, and always right Nature. Elation! 

Just what is “Warm” And “Cool”? 

So what do we mean when we speak of a “warm” or “cool” color? Well, warm colors such as reds, oranges, yellows, golds, and rusts will “warm up” a mixture. It’ll add a tone to it that “heats” it up. On the other hand, cool colors such as blues, purples, and greens will “cool down” a mixture by just adding a “chillier” tone. So a warm palette really leans into the yellows, oranges, and red undertones, one half of the color wheel, while a cool palette leans into blue, green, or purple undertones, the other half of the color wheel. 

But it’s not as simple as the presence or absence of reds, yellows, oranges, golds, and rusts which would “warm up” a mixture. Why? Because each of those colors has their own variety of warm and cool tones! Yes — there is such a thing as a cool red and a warm red! For instance, a cool red is Alizarin Crimson with its blue undertone while a warm red is Cadmium Red with its orange undertone. Generally speaking then, cool reds lean into the purple and blue spectrum and away from the yellows, rusts, and oranges while warm reds tend to be the opposite. Likewise, cool yellows tend to lean into the green undertone while warm yellows lean into the orange undertone. For instance, Hansa Yellow is a good example of a cool yellow while Cadmium Yellow Deep is an example of a warm yellow. Even blue has its warm and cool counterparts. For instance, Ultramarine Blue is often thought of as a warm blue with its purple leanings (and therefore reds) while Phthalo Blue can be considered a cool blue as it leans into the greens more (but more on the blues later). 

Likewise, whites and blacks have their warm and cool counterparts which can make a big difference in our mixtures, too. For instance, Zinc White is a good example of a cool white while Antique White is a warm white with a tan bias. Curiously, Titanium White is more neutral, making it an ideal white for just about any palette. Similarly, Ivory Black with its blue undertone is an example of a cool black while Mars Black is more of a warm black with its brown (red) undertone. 

And make no mistake, the warm and cool colors on our palette matters, and matters big time. Indeed, our color mixes can be radically changed simply by switching them out, warmth and cooling being that powerful. Indeed, not accounting for the “temperature” of a color is often why we miss our target colors outright or misinterpret a color wheel entirely. It can be why we’re constantly fighting our mixtures, never quite pinpointing our references as we wish or even inadvertently creating “mud.” It’s not that what we’re doing is intrinsically wrong, it’s probably because we aren’t accounting for the temperature of the colors we’re mixing together. In this light, it can be a good idea to have both a warm and cool counterpart of our primaries in our paint kit to better coordinate our mixes as needed. In other words, have a warm and cool red, a warm and cool yellow, and a warm and cool blue so we can accommodate temperature better as we mix colors. Also know the temperature of your horsey colors, often referred to as "earth colors" in painting circles. And, of course, whites and blacks have their cool and warm counterparts as do the greys. Bone black is a warm black with a brown undertone, for example, whereas Lamp Black is a cool black with a blue undertone. As for grey, Payne's Grey is a cool grey with a bluish cast whereas Portland Warm Grey is a taupe-like warm grey. You can even create a lovely neutral grey mixing Ultramarine Blue, Burnt Umber, and Titanium White. For variations, switch out with Raw Umber for a cooler "not red" grey or add in Burnt Sienna or Indian Red for a more purple cast. You can also make grey from complements such as mixing Lemon Yellow with Dioxazine Purple and Titanium White for a lovely taupeish grey color. Or mix Raw Umber and Burnt Umber together for a nice basic more neutral brown. Now as for white, it should be noted that paints made with linseed oil tend to have a warmer undertone whereas paints made with safflower oil tend to be cooler, both of which directly affect the undertones of our whites.

Ultimately then, what does this mean? That we need to refine our Eye to perceive the warmth and coolness of the colors we see in our references, on our palette, and in our paintjob. Indeed, the better we can perceive these temperature shifts, the closer we’ll nail our target colors, and with greater clarity, ease, and depth. 

Nevertheless, our references, our palette, and our paintjob entail three different levels of perception that need careful training to sync so we can match our desired colors between them. This is because we can look at things in our references, our palette, and our paintjob, but the moment we look away, we have to rely on memory and it’s here that our brain can inadvertently shift tones as it processes a new view, especially when it comes to the temperature of a color. What’s a workaround? When we mix colors with our palette knife, hold that knife right up to the reference to check both its hue and its temperature side-by-side, up close and personal. That side-by-side comparison is important! Why? Because it’s amazing how our brain can misinterpret things when it looks away and has to reprocess a new view. But practice at this and we’ll soon train our Eye to better hone in on and mentally retain the necessary information of our target colors more easily. 

Another thing we’re working against is an inherent bias in our art form for reds with an accompanying strong bias against the “not reds,” the cool colors. It makes some sense though when it comes to horse colors, right? Our horses aren’t colored in blues, purples, and greens. They aren’t macaws or tropical fish! Nope, they’re shades of reds, rusts, golds, yellows, peaches, browns, tans and taupes, blacks, greys, and whites...that sorta thing. Even so though, Nature has a much bigger color story to tell! If we look closely then, we find that it offers up those “not reds” as cool variations of our horsey colors whether in their coats, their manes, tails, and feathers, their hooves, their palmar feet, their chestnuts, their eyes, their teeth and tongue, and lots of other places on the body. So unless we perceive and duplicate this fuller color story, not only will our portfolio be limited, but we’ll fail to fully explore all the wonderful options laid out before us that adds so much more interest, authenticity, and realism to our work. 

For example, we really lean into Burnt Umber (warm brown) but shirk from Raw Umber (cool brown), interpreting it as “too green.” It really isn’t green though per se, it’s just not red. It’s very much a cool brown. We’re so biased towards red though, we literally perceive anything “not red” as greenish or bluish. But here’s the thing, if we’re paying attention to Nature’s color story, these “not reds” are equally important and have as much to offer our palette as any warm color. For example, dark hooves and chestnuts can be in the cooler spectrum and some grey skin can be based on cool violet. Many horse colors also require a cooler temperature in part or in whole, such as some silvers, mushroom, champagnes, and liver chestnuts. 

For another example, we really veer towards Indian Yellow, a warm yellow, but careen away from Nickel Azo Yellow, a cool “green” yellow. Yet a cool yellow has a lot of great uses, producing a whole spectrum of interesting golds that can be handy for certain palominos, buckskins, duns, and pale chestnuts. Like I used Nickel Azo Yellow to great effect on Itza Hoot and his sooty palomino color. Or for instance, we’ll miss our target for the bluish cast on a porcelain grey (grey on black) if we use warm Mars Black instead of cool Ivory Black. On that note, some colors are often a blend of cool grey-tans and warm grey-tans such as many grullas and foal colors. If we don’t know both our warm and cool colors though, we’re going to miss these target colors altogether. 

Putting It To Practice 

So pay attention to the bigger color story Nature presents! Don’t be afraid of color! Dive in! Whatever your reliable reference is telling you, try it! But how do we actually train our Eye to discern color better? How can we identify what color family a particular hue belongs to? How can we tell if an undertone is warm or cool? Why does any of this even matter? 

Well, for starters, a handy way to decipher color families in a reference is to upload it into a photo editing program (like Photoshop). Then use the color sampling tool to sample an area then pull up the color palette of that sample. Immediately, it’ll tell you exactly what color family that sample belongs to — easy as pie! Do this all over your reference from the pink muzzle to the hooves to the leg chestnuts to the palmar foot to all the areas on the body to the mane and tail. Even the dirt in the feathers. Everywhere. Soon you’ll get a much better idea just how much “non-horsey” colors play into what we do and especially their accompanying coolness and warmth. You’re going to be surprised! You’ll find that warm and cool colors play over like a patchwork quilt over the horse and that color families aren’t always of the expected sort! For instance, we can often find greens in dark hooves, violets in muzzle grey, purply hues in blues eyes, and mauves in muzzle pink, each of varying warmth and coolness. Perhaps one of the most surprising I’ve found was the cool green-based black horse! Now yes, we do have to take some of this with a grain of salt as we are talking about print and camera and screen color mechanics and limitations, but even so, it does knock us out of our conventional thinking all the same, and in a good way. When we open up our sensibilities to all the colors rather than just the strictly the horse colors, we not only diversify our palette to target our colors more efficiently, but we also become more sensitive to their temperature. Do this enough times then with many different chestnuts, many different bays, many different grullas, many different pearls, many different whatevers, and sooner than you think, your Eye will begin to train naturally on color families and their accompanying temperature. Indeed, make this color sampling a habit with your reference before you paint and you’ll build a reliable game plan before you even touch bristle to paint! 

Now does this actually mean we can use violets, greens, blues, purples, and yellow-greens in our mixes? Why, yes — yes it does. Go for it! If Nature uses it, why not you? But it also means that we should challenge any red bias we may have because clearly, Nature paints with far more colors. And again, why not you? (Recommended reading: A Cacophony Of Color: The Magic Of Unlikely Pigments.) If color sampling teaches us anything, it clearly shows us that Nature is far more varied in what it uses to colorize things. It also demonstrates that each similar color can actually be rather different. Like two greys, two bays, and two chestnuts may look similar, sure, but they also have differences that make each unique. So yeah, why not your paintwork? Why stick with the same ol’ formulas and habits that crank out the same ol’ color schemes when there are so many more options Nature offers us? When we can also improve the scope and depth of our portfolio to boot? Throw more colors in there! And in turn, learn how to use their temperatures to manipulate their use to the best effects. 

But how can we objectively determine if a particular color is warm or cool on our own? Well, just remember that warm colors lean into reds, yellows, and oranges while cool colors lean in to greens, blues, and on occasion, purples. So consider this…if you’re a bit uncertain as to the temperature of a certain color, hold a piece of white printer paper next to it as a neutral “key.” Now how does the color appear as compared to the white? Can you better see its temperature now? Like can you start to see its red, orange, and yellow leanings? Or its blue, green, and purple leanings? The white usually makes the undertone pop more to our Eye, so try this trick if you get stuck. 

Now as a good training exercise, take your tubes of paint and sort them according to their temperature. For instance, your reds, yellows, and oranges go in one pile and your blues, greens, purples, and violets go in another pile. Put your browns, whites, and blacks in those respective piles, too. Like Raw Umber goes into the cool pile while Burnt Umber goes into the warm pile, for example. Now take white note cards and put a swatch of each color on that card, next to its kin. For instance, put a swatch of all your greens on a card and compare them side to side. Their temperatures become a lot more obvious when they’re right next to each other for direct comparison, especially on a white notecard. Okay, now here’s where it gets interesting…now create subset piles of your warm and cool reds, warm and cool yellows, warm and cool blues, warm and cool browns, etc., using those color cards as guides. It’s really important to know which of your colors, especially your primaries, are cool and which are warm because their temperature will affect how they mix with the other colors quite a bit.

Now let’s talk about blue. Blue blue blue. See, there’s often disagreement over the temperatures of blues because it’s just a color that’s harder to define as a subset of warm and cool. Blue is a color that just is, in many ways. In truth though, most blues have a green slant to them with very few with a red slant, across media. For instance, Cobalt Blue is considered by many to be the most neutral bluest blue, depending on the manufacturer. Then in that light, Ultramarine Blue and Indanthrone Blue can be thought of as warm blues and Cerulean Blue and Phthalo Blue can be thought of as cool blues. But well…that’s open to debate when you get them down on white notecards as swatches! But a handy trick is to do a series of mixing swatches with a cool yellow — which blues create clear, vibrant greens? Those will be your cool blues. In turn, which will create dulled greens like army or olive or muddy greens? Those will be your warm blues. 

But why is all this so important? Well, for four major reasons. First, Seeing the temperatures of your colors helps you to both identify and nail your target hues more efficiently and confidently. Indeed, many horse coats are a patchwork of both cool and warm hues and so we really need to See those shifts to get them into our paintjob. Second, knowing the temperature of the colors on your palette helps you to avoid creating “deadened” muddy colors. Like if you mix a warm blue, say Ultramarine Blue, that has a bit of red in it, with a with a cool yellow, like Hansa Yellow Light, that has a bit of green in it, what do you think is going to happen between the red and green undertones? Yep, you’re going to generate a dulled, muddy color instead of a vibrant, clear color. (Instead then, it might have been better to use a warm yellow like Cadmium Yellow Deep that also has a bit of red in it.) So many artists find frustration with their color mixing because they inexplicably keep creating mud or colors not quite right for their target hues and blame their lack of skill, even their paint. Chances are though that’s it’s simply an unawareness of their colors’ temperatures that’s the culprit here. Really, get a handle on that, and your mixes will often magically fix themselves! Yet third, there’s nothing wrong with mud and dulled colors if that’s the target you’re going for! Mud can indeed be magic! For instance, leg chestnuts and the palmar foot benefit from these hues quite a bit as do some tones on the hooves. Some coat colors can also be muddy like mushroom and some silvers. In fact, champagne and grulla can be thought of as specialized kinds of mud. But we won’t know how to make effective mud if we don’t know how to manipulate color temperatures, will we? And what if we need a warm mud or a cool mud — do we know how to make those purposely? If we don’t know about color temperature, we’re simply working at a sharp disadvantage with purposeful mixing. And fourth, if we don’t understand temperature, we won’t be able to manipulate our pigments very well and that can greatly limit our palette. Like let’s say we have a green that’s more neutral like a Sage green. How would we warm it up while keeping it green? Well, we can add some warm Quinacridone Gold to it to lean it into warm yellow. How would we cool it down while keeping it green? We can add in some cool Prussian Blue to blue it up. In this way, we can turn any color into a host of purposeful new ones when we know how to mix them, opening up our palette to better explore the possibilities. Truly, when we can mix our own classic silver dapple tones and don’t need to reply on store-bought bottles, for example, we not only gain a lot of uniqueness, versatility, and adaptability, but we also gain something even more powerful — independence and autonomy in our paintwork. The moment that happens is when we’ll find that painting not only becomes a lot more fun and interesting, but our paintwork expands in scope and depth with all these new varied infusions. We also gain a lot more confidence and authority with our painting as we have the ability to target any color we wish more accurately. And who can argue with an authentically rendered reliable reference? 

Now in practical application within this paradigm, let’s take grulla, perhaps one of the hardest colors to conjure up for similar reasons. In this, grulla is based on a neutral “barn dove grey" but in certain areas it can be warmed up while on other areas it can be cooled down. How do we do that without killing it or veering off-track? Well, for our neutral “barn dove grey” we can start with Raw Sienna which is a “not red” brown with Titanium White, a more neutral white, with Ivory Black, a bluish black. Then to warm that up we can add in a red through Burnt Umber or to cool it down we can add more cool grey (Titanium White and Ivory Black). For variation, we can add in Purple Lake, a cool purple to give it that lavender cast some grullas have, or Van Dyke Brown, a warm flat brown, as needed. But if we didn’t know about color temperatures, we wouldn’t know how to do this very well and so probably end up frustrated and confused with not only our color mixes, but without even knowing the directions we had to go to nail all those varied colors in the first place. Indeed, grulla is a color easy to go off-track with because it can very quickly veer into the too cool (too grey) or too warm (too red) spectrum and therefore not read correctly. In short, if we don’t know about color temperature, our ability to capture certain colors — purposely, accurately, and confidently — is harder to achieve. For example, many tricky colors such as silvers, pearls, champagnes, mushroom, buckskins, and even many chestnuts rely on manipulating temperature to be truly successful. 

Conclusion 

What does all this boil down to? Simple. Color is complicated! But it’s complicated in a really interesting and useful way so if we know even a little bit of its secrets, we have a much better chance at pinpointing our target colors. 

And it’s all about those target colors, isn’t it? Truly, this means that nailing each of our targets can be critical for the overall color to read correctly. One shift in the wrong direction can throw everything off kilter! In other words, a good paintjob isn’t just piecemealed, but also the sum of its parts to look realistic. In order to achieve that happy end then, temperature should be factored in our mixing decisions since those warm and cool colors on our palette are key to matching our targets that add up to the whole. Really, if a color doesn’t seem to quite match the reference despite everything, it’s most likely not matching in its temperature. And this has to happen right from the get-go, too, right from our basecoat and first layers of paint! We have to be vigilant from brushstroke one especially for those trickier colors like grulla, champagne, pearl, and silver. 

But the biggest takeaway is that Nature paints with both warm and cool colors as it wishes. It doesn’t care one iota about color harmonies, that’s a human-made concept. To Nature, color is just color and so for us, that just means color is meant to be played with, rules are meant to be broken, and we’re supposed to have fun with our mixes in the spirit of curiosity and exploration. So take your cues from Nature — warm up to color and have a cool time with it! 

“The greatest masterpieces were once only pigments on a palette.” 

— Henry S. Hoskins

Fire And Ice: The Power Of a Warm And Cool Palette

Dazzled By Dapples Part II

Introduction to Part II 

Painting the dappling on a grey is a true test of an equine artist working in realism, absolutely. Truly, there are few things that’ll challenge us more in this exacting art form. In this then, learn to render a convincing dapple grey and we also tend to unlock other artistic tools and tricks that help us in other areas of our art as well, it’s that powerful of a learning curve. So let’s continue our discussion on painting this tricky pattern in this Part II… 

Artistic Approaches 

Think of dapple grey as “ordered chaos.” It’s a mess, but an orderly mess. That’s to say, it has structure but also randomness, or “organic chaos.” As such, a paintjob should give a clear impression of this as well, of a pattern (order) infused with randomness and individualistic eccentricities (chaos). In a nutshell then, a convincing dapple grey paintjob is a balance between extremes which is one of the reasons why it’s so tricky to capture. 

There are two ways to paint dapple grey: Dark on light or light on dark. However, best results tend to happen by employing both directions rather than relying on just one. Indeed, a lot of back-and-forth adjustments are often required to achieve the most convincing impression. 

Blacks and whites are handy for a classic dapple grey. Like use either Ivory Black (for a cool bluer dapple grey, or “porcelain” grey) or Mars Black (for a warm browner dapple grey) and Titanium White. Indeed, different blacks and whites will yield different results so experiment. Now if you want a more neutral tone to your grey, add some browns like a bit of Burnt Umber, Raw Umber, or taupes to neutralize the “cold” blue-ish tendency of many blacks. 

Rosegrey is a brownish version of dapple grey and should be approached exactly the same but with the infusion of additional colors such as Burnt Umber, Burnt Sienna, and various other shades of chocolates, mochas, browns, roses, rusts, or golds. 

Keep the pattern distinct; be clear in our painting and don’t muddy the idea by becoming too complicated. There's a fine line between ordered chaos and a confusing mess. 

Dapple grey is a grainy color, not a “smooth,” “clear” one like chestnut, for instance. This is because the pattern is created by a mixing of the coat color and white hairs, creating a roan-like effect or “grain” to the overall look of the coat. This means we need to paint a grain into our paintjob and, above all, avoid over-blending things. Here then it’s okay to have little speckles in our paintwork! Just keep it on the tiny and subtle side so as not to create a confusing or out-of-scale effect. Remember, we just want to impart the look of mixed-hair graininess, not create a muddled mess. 

Details 

Fleabites are a fun detail to add. You can hand draw them in with a color pencil (keep it sharp), pastel pencil, or a size 00 paintbrush, or splatter them on with thinned down paint (like ink) and a stiff toothbrush (flicked with your thumb). Fleabites can occur all over the body, be concentrated in certain areas or present only in strategic patches. However, they are often absent on the lower body and under-belly. Fleabites are the hue of the base color and can vary in color over the body consistent with the “bloom” of the underlying coat. Sometimes, a fleabitten grey will have a “bloody shoulder” marking, or a lacy patch(s) of the base color remaining on the body which can be a small patch or quite large, depending on individual variation. 

Rub marks, usually caused by lying down, can occur on the high points of the knee, point of hock, and fetlock, manifesting as white patches about the size of a dime or quarter and sometimes with a darker center, forming a "donut" of pale hairs. (That darker center is actually a hollow in the coat from being rubbed out.)

Ergots can at times retain a dollop of color, and sometimes with a pale center (often when shaved closely), creating a "donut" of color on it.

Dark skin can show through a thin, silky coat or when the animal sweats, often showing up around the crown, pectorals, elbow, point of shoulder, throatlatch, flank, and stifle. This can be breed-influenced, too, since hot bloods like Arabians, Amazigh, Tekes, and Thoroughbreds tend to have thinner skin and finer coats to really expose the underlying dark skin. That being the case then, pay attention to references when it comes to dark skin peeking through the coat. Look for where and how it happens. 

Sometimes patches of color can be retained throughout the greying out process, of varying sizes and intensities. It makes for a neat detail if our reference supports it.

Things to Avoid 

Always avoid uniformity or regimentation in dappling, including uniformity in their size, shape, placement, hue, intensity, and detail. However, while each dapple should be unique, at the same time it should be a cohesive contribution to the overall effect. So really study a reference to decipher not just the differences between the dapples, but the similarities, too. 

Don’t ignore the transitions in the dark networking. So study the transitions between the more intense dark networking and the less intense networking as it diffuses into a greyed out area, and look specifically for the resultant “shadow trails.” Like sometimes they’re diffused and more even in transition and sometimes they’re jagged like broken honeycombs. Capturing what our reference shows us with the dark networks will be important for the believability of our overall effect. Never forget that a convincing dapple grey is an artistic combination of both the dapples and the dark networks, not just the dapples. So think of the dapples as our “positive space” and the dark networks as our “negative space,” and look for the patterns in both. 

Avoid a highly-blended, overly-smooth finish as we want to preserve both graininess and “organic chaos” to avoid a “powder puff” effect. 

As the pattern progresses from its dark phases, avoid highly-blended, uniform shadings on the legs since the greying pattern often creates a lot of patchiness, mottling, and abrupt transitions between light and dark in these areas. Even so, there are exceptions, of course, so pay attention to references in this regard. 

Avoid excessive muscle shading and highlighting to help keep the pattern clear and distinguishable. If not, we risk a confused, muddled, even highly stylized effect on the pattern. 

Avoid timidity with color on a dark or medium dapple grey. Instead, be bold with the dark and light areas on those phases because they’re by no means wishy-washy. Conversely, as the pattern progresses, toning down the contrasts between the darks and lights really helps to emulate the look of a light dapple grey. So think about intensities of the darks and lights when considering which phase to paint. 

Try not to misinterpret the color by laying white and dark portions in the wrong patterns. Often dapple grey paintjobs aren’t convincing because the artist mistakenly juxtaposed these light and dark areas in their paintwork. 

Avoid pink shading on the body where white markings aren’t present. Sometimes, artists inaccurately pink the elbow and flank areas, which although correct for a pink-skinned dilute, is incorrect for a dark-skinned dapple grey. 

Don’t have the dapples look “painted on top” by “setting them back” into the paintjob. We do this by painting both the dapples and dark networks together rather than adding the dapples on last “on top” of the rest of the paintjob. 

Avoid painting on “stamped dapples,” or dapples that lack diffused edges, that look like they’ve simply been stamped on with an abrupt, hard edge to them. Dapples, even intense and condensed new dapples, have a diffused edge as they blend into the surrounding dark networking so be sure to mimic that quality with a bit of subtle blending. 

Don’t rush! We need to take our time and be methodical and careful. There’s a reason why dapple greys take longer — they're just that involved. Indeed, the moment we rush is the moment our brain’s propensity for regimentation really kicks in as we get careless and hurried. Take breaks, slow down, pay attention to references…dapple grey happens in its own time. 

Artistic Tricks 

Look for the pattern. Dapple grey does indeed often have a set of tendencies that govern the lay and nature of the dapples and the nature of the dark networks over the body. For example, look how the dapples track across the barrel in “dapple chains." Similarly, look for “dapple rosettes” as they group together and radiate out like on spokes. Likewise, look how the dapples morph in their characteristics over the neck, the shoulder, the barrel, and the hindquarter. Indeed, the dapples on the neck can be quite different from the dapples on the barrel, for instance. 

Pay attention to diffusion. In this, some dapple grey coats are very contrasty with their dappling whereas others are softer and more diffused, so pay attention to that effect to capture the type of dapple grey we intend. Likewise, on some greys, the dapples are rather intense overall whereas on others they’re diffused and softened, so be mindful of that effect in references as well. 

Regularly check our work by looking at our paintjob “backwards” in a large hand mirror. This trick creates a sort of instant fresh eye that helps us pinpoint areas of regimentation, contrivance, or oddness pretty quickly. Also be sure to do the same for our references so we can see them “backwards” for comparison as well. 

Paint upside down! Yes! Turn references and the sculpture upside down and simply paint that way to really pull our brain’s biases out of the equation. Know it or not but our brain imposes a certain look to things, a preferred pattern, onto all our dapple greys which will unconsciously skew the look of all our greys, and often away from reality. This is why we can still identify who did what grey simply because their style and biases still get injected into the pattern. But if we paint upside down (or sideways), we break up that preferred pattern and are more forced to simply paint what’s there. It’ll feel disconcerting at first for that reason, but do this often enough as checks throughout the process and we’ll find that our dapple greys kick up a notch in the realism department. 

Use a photo editing program to invert the lights and darks of our reference photo so the dapples become dark spots and the dark networks become light honeycombs. This can really help us re-visualize the pattern and find its defining characteristics and patterns rather quickly. 

Use a photo editing program it pull the color out of our reference to turn in into a greyscale image, a black and white image. Sometimes color can be distracting and this technique can really simplify the pattern for clarity. This trick is especially helpful with rosegreys. 

In a photo editing program, scale up or down our reference to the scale we’re painting then print it out at that scale. It’s amazing how the pattern morphs depending on scale and how our approach to it may change, and all because of the size of our sculpture. 

Speaking of scale, we’re going to find that as it shrinks, hinting at effects will become more effective than literally rendering them as we could on a large scale. For example, the hair-by-hair technique becomes less effective as scale shrinks. So always be mindful of scale with grain, ticking, details, dapples, and other dapple grey characteristics when making our creative decisions. 

Sometimes to get sizing right, it doesn’t hurt to count dapples across a body region to nail that more accurately on the sculpture. We don’t have to get draconian crazy with it, but sometimes counting dapples can help us pinpoint dapple size better in our paintjob. 

It’s easy to get overwhelmed or too immersed in the fiddly bits of this pattern and so we can get lost pretty quickly. To stay on track then and see a bigger picture, periodically squinting our eyes when we study our piece and our references can help to remove details to reduce things to its more basic elements. And this is important because if any horse pattern had to work as an overall effect most of all, it would be dapple grey. 

On that note, approach a dapple grey in this direction: Big ideas first then adjustments then details. In other words, don’t try to do it all at once. Take it in stages and progressively work towards more fiddly detail. Really, if ever a color had a long series of ugly stages, it would be dapple grey! Because really, if we try to do too much too soon, we can be thrown off track or regiment our dappling rather quickly. One step at a time. 

Find landmark dapples and work out from them. In this, some dapples are particularly prominent, unusual, or intense, so use them as landmarks to orient the pattern onto the sculpture and from which to build the overall pattern. 

Understand that dapple grey is a constellation of characteristics that add up to a distinctive whole. It’s not any one element by itself. This being so, it’s not enough to simply slap dapples onto a color and call it dapple grey. That’s like simply outlining the borders of a pinto pattern and calling it a day. It’s also why the more authentic elements of a dapple grey we infuse into our paintwork, the more convincing it becomes, our goal. So we need to be sure to get it all in there based on our reference(s) so we realize the full potential of our paintwork. 

Create some specialized dappling brushes by literally ruining them. Why would we need specialized dappling brushes? Because they can be useful “randomizing” tools that do much of the work for us when it comes to size and shape, helping us to focus more on the other aspects of dappling like placement, hue, intensity, and detail. Indeed, the more of our brains we can take out of the equation, the better, to help mediate regimentation. In other words, if we can have a tool to do some of the tricky work for us, that’s a real boon! So to make such a brush, take a small round and a small filbert (or a bright or a shader) and use scissors to “break up the line of the bristles” a bit more (don’t get crazy, just cut some minor notches into the bristles) or create more of a point in the round. Then scrub the holy hannah out of them on some coarse sandpaper to rough them up. Don’t get too crazy though or they’ll be rubbed down into useless nubs. What we want is to randomize and breakdown the bristles a bit more so work them just until that happens. Then smooth back over with your fingers and voilá…properly messed up dappling brushes! In the end, we should have something like this…. 

To use them then, lightly scrub or tap the brush onto the surface with just a little bit of paint on the bristles to create the dapple in a dry brush technique, being sure to spin it for the next dapple to avoid using it as a cloning stamp which would, again, create a regimented look. Using a dappling brush definitely has a learning curve so practice practice practice, but we’ll get the hang of it soon enough. And switching out between the round and the filberts will be necessary to achieve the different dapple shapes and nuances required over different areas of the body. Then once we’re done, we can go back and work on intensity and detail with a more controlled approach with paint, color pencils, pastel pencils, or what have you. 

Along those lines, don’t be afraid to do back-and-forth work to “set back” the dapples into the paintwork to avoid an artificial “painted on top” look. In this think about painting the dapples in conjunction with the dark networks throughout the process rather than simply painting the dapples on top of them at the last stage. Plus, we may find doing one layer of dapples (then letting that dry) then doing a wash of some kind over them to set them back then doing a second dappling pass over them to strategically intensify them afterwards creates the look we want. Point being, good grey dappling takes a lot of fiddling and futzing, so don’t be afraid to fiddle and futz with it. Being so, dappling can indeed become a bit tedious and time-consuming, but it can also be quite meditative and calming, too, so approach it with that spin to avoid restlessness, impatience, or frustration. To that end, take breaks between dappling sessions to help manage regimentation and to rest and reset. The worst thing we can do is rush things so we need to take our time and pace ourselves. 

Conclusion 

Clearly, painting a convincing dapple grey takes a bit of know-how and insight. Sure it takes technical skill with pigment and our tools then adept use of some aces up our sleeve, but just as much, it takes a goodly measure of perception and observation to render the pattern effectively. So while certain colors will challenge us with matching the hues such as a grulla, or with intricacy such as an appaloosa, or with tedium such as a ticked sabino, the dapple grey pattern will challenge us with the most difficult component of all: “Organic chaos,” or that sense of organic randomness. This lightening in a bottle is the grail, the solution, of painting a believable dapple grey yet it’s the most difficult effect for the human brain to mimic due to the imposition of the pattern recognition response. So be ready to struggle a bit, to get confused and lost at times as we paint in the dapples, and to become a bit exhausted after a time. All this is normal with such a tricky, time-consuming, complex pattern! We definitely aren’t alone in this. 

So take our time, be methodical, use the proper tools, employ tricks, and pay attention to our references and our paintjob to gain a leg up. Study lots of dapple greys, too, to develop a solid mental library to draw from and to refine our Eye more accurately and with more adaptability. Over time then, trust that the pattern will become easier to render so just keep at it, diligently and carefully. Interpreting a great dapple grey doesn’t take just aptitude with a technique, it takes savvy with our Eye, too, and all that just takes doing it over and over and over again, ever expanding our skillset and knowledge base. And truly, a beautiful dapple grey is dazzling for sure, but what’s even more brilliant is how we can learn to trick our own brains into working for us rather than against us. In turn, learning to do this will open up whole new skillsets and levels of perception that can help us in other areas of our artwork, the best gift painting dapple grey has to offer. 

So go ahead and wow us with your dapple greys! Trick that brain of yours out of its pattern-induced hypnotic trance to showcase this glorious color with all the potential locked up inside of you! We can’t wait to oogle your dazzling dappled results! 

“If I could say it in words there would be no reason to paint.” 

— Edward Hopper 

I’d like to thank both Lesli Kathman of The Equine Tapestry and Lynn Cassels-Caldwell of Snowdrift Studio for the use of their photos in this blog series. Thank you, ladies! You helped to take this series right over the top! A million thank yous!

Dazzled By Dapples Part II

Dazzled By Dapples Part I

Introduction to Part I 

Dapple grey is a favorite color among many folks for good reason — it’s both beautiful and striking. And, truly, there are few things quite as lovely or ethereal as a nice dapple grey! Yet for our sculptures, it can be an extraordinarily challenging color to paint with all its characteristics, variations, and nuances that can give even the most experienced painter fits. Indeed, there’s a big reason why dapple grey takes significantly more time and skill to paint! So in the spirit of making this process a bit easier and more clear, let’s talk about grey dappling from a practical standpoint and hopefully we can kick our results up a notch. 

In this Part I then we’ll begin our exploration with some basic ideas about dapple grey and some reasons why it’s so tricky to paint. Once we grasp these preliminary concepts, we’re in a much better position to really dig into Part II with more clarity and confidence. So let’s just dive in… 

The Problem With Pattern Recognition 

The human brain can be thought of as a sophisticated pattern recognition machine, adept at finding and interpreting patterns of all kinds. Really, when you think about it, nearly everything can be broken down into a pattern in some way so it makes sense that evolution shaped the brain thusly. In fact, the brain loves patterns so much, it’ll simply make them up where none exist which is where we get our gambling addictions, logic fallacies, conspiracy theories, and superstitions. 

Now one would think that pattern recognition is a boon when it comes to painting something like dapple grey, and we’d be right — but only to a point. Because the problem is our brain is actually too good at pattern recognition, fixating on it too quickly and powerfully which ends up becoming a real liability when it comes to capturing authentic horse color. Why? Because it’s exactly in our pattern recognition response where we get the dreaded regimentation in our dappling paintwork. What’s regimentation? It’s when our dappling becomes too uniform in its characteristics over the sculpture, driving it away from realism and towards contrivance and stylization. And the problem begins quickly as our brain will regiment our dappling nearly instantly the moment we touch brush to sculpture and right under our noses to boot. It’s simply what it does. It’s why our hands will fall into a dappling habit so quickly if we aren’t careful to mediate this strong tendency. And it’s also why our Eye — our knowledge base, tastes, biases, aesthetic, and style — will skew towards uniformity in our dappling as our brain prejudices us against the organic randomness of nature. 

As a result, the moment we begin to dapple our piece is the moment we must be vigilant against regimentation and we do this in four ways. First, we pay close attention to our references and really lean into them as we dapple. Taking our cues from authentic nature is nearly always the better policy. Second, we reset our Eye by taking refreshing breaks. This not only allows us to rest a bit, as all that focus can be exhausting, but it also breaks up the routine of dappling to hopefully inject more variation into the overall mix. Third, we use specialized tools like dappling brushes to do more of the work for us in a way that better randomizes the results (discussed in Part II). And fourth, we employ artistic tricks and strategies to help steer us away from uniformity and habit and more towards organic authenticity (discussed in Part II). 

The point being, we have to work against our own brain in order to render a more realistic dapple grey and those who are most adept at this tend to create the most convincing dapples. As such, our prime directive then is to avoid regimentation as much as possible to better express organic realism and that’s within our grasp with just a bit of know-how. 

Things to Remember about Dapple Grey 

Dapple grey is mostly a function of heat in that the areas that are hottest tend to lighten faster. This is why those characteristic areas grey out as those are areas of thinner skin or they have blood carrying networks closer to the surface (like veins or capillaries). It's also why blanketing, neck sweating, or even the mane itself can cause a pale patch. In fact, that's all a dapple really is in most cases: A lightened warm capillary "burst" of branches. And because capillaries are so individualistic in shape, being random in their branching, so a grey dapple is, too. Really, if you look closely, they're like snowflakes, no two exactly alike. They may share a similar look, yes, but each is as individual as a fingerprint. 

Dapple grey is a progressive color that develops as the horse ages. As such, foals are born dark and so dapple grey develops from dark to medium to light as the horse grows older. The extreme version can result in a white horse. In short, foals typically aren’t born dapple grey. In fact, a foal destined to grey out will sometimes have white hairs around the eyes (“goggles”), muzzle, dock, inside the ears, or even ticked throughout the coat. 

It’s a composite color made up of the coat color and white hairs. Being so, dapple grey can occur on any coat color and in conjunction with any pattern or markings. 

There are many types of grey that describe the effect the gene has on the coat color. For instance, there are rosegreys (dapple grey on bay, chestnut, dun, etc.), steelgreys (a grey coat without dapples), fleabitten grey (tiny flecks of the coat color that remain during the graying out process which can also develop in conjunction with dapples), porcelain grey (dapple grey on black) and a whole host of variations in between. However, it’s important to know that dapple grey isn’t roan though it often gets confused with that color. 

“White,” the lightest stage of dapple grey, isn’t Cremello (also erroneously termed “albino”). Dapple greys have dark skin (except under white markings) whereas Cremellos have pink skin.

Not all aged horses grey out pure white either, but sometimes retain some pigment, especially on the points, in particular the joints, and sometimes in the mane and tail. On the other hand, some youngsters may grey out rather quickly. Sometimes the rapidity of the greying progression is hereditary and sometimes individual, or both. So while dapple grey’s progression is linked to the horse’s age, it’s not necessarily an accurate indicator of age. Fleabites aren’t an accurate indicator of age either because they can pop up rather early in the greying process. 

Although dapple grey has telltale characteristics, within those “rules” the color is quite diverse and varied; no two dapple greys are alike. The individual qualities are as unique as giraffe spots or zebra stripes. 

Some Tips 

Think of dapple grey as a pattern, not a color. If regarded as a pattern with the dapples and the dark networks entombing them, painting it becomes more clear. So look for dapple patterns and network patterns as though you were deciphering an appaloosa, pinto, or zebra pattern. And use the skills you’ve learned translating appy and pinto patterns. For example, on appaloosas, we often learn to see dark spots on a light area whereas with pintos, we learn to see white laid onto a coat color. However, with dapple grey, we have to apply both skills at the same time. In other words, don’t just see white dots on dark areas and dark patterns under white dots — see both and how they relate to each other and morph over the regions of the body. 

Think of the various shades of dapple grey as different levels of intensity of the dark portions. In other words, a dark dapple grey has a high intensity of dark areas and a light dapple grey has a low intensity of dark areas. A medium dapple grey is the most diverse, having a wide range of intensities on the same horse. 

The dapple grey pattern often begins at the crown, facial features, throat and jugular, elbow area, flank, inner legs, groin, and in the groove between the semitendinosus muscle and biceps femoris muscle on the hindquarter. Though there are exceptions, the first dapples tend to emanate from the coat small and condensed to then enlarge and diffuse as the pattern progresses. On a classic dapple grey, dapples are often white or shades of pale grey. On a rosegrey, dapples can be any variety of tones often ranging from rust to mocha to gold to rosy to grey to white, depending on the body color. 

Sometimes dapples can be muddled in some areas and distinct in others so look how they change in how striking or muted they are over the regions of the body. Likewise, sometimes the dark areas can be very pronounced in some areas and very diffused or lightened in others so don't forget to pay attention to the nature of the dark networks as well.

There are six components to dapples: Size, shape, placement, hue, intensity, and detail. Employing all six qualities will help us avoid an artificial-looking “rocking horse” impression and a more “grown,” natural look in our final effect. Really, the better these six qualities, the more convincing our dapple grey will be… 

Size: Dapples can vary in size compared to their neighbors and on different regions of the body. For instance, sometimes the dappling on the neck, shoulder, or hindquarter can be a bit larger than the dappling on the barrel. However, sometimes they can be sized a bit more uniform as a whole as it all depends on individual variation of the pattern. Point is, pay attention to dapple size in a reference as it relates to its kin, across the body, and to the overall effect. 

Shape: Every dapple is unique in shape, like a snowflake, so be mindful of this as we paint. Like some dapples are rounder or oblong blobs, some are crystalline-like, some are like puzzle pieces, some are like bursts or stars, some are like branches, and some are like checkers, and lots more in between. So pay attention to all the different shapes seen within a dappling pattern. 

Placement: Dapples often vary in their spacing from each other, with some being tightly packed (with narrow dark honeycombs) while others more loosely packed (with broader dark honeycombs) so avoid an even spacing between all the dapples. 

Hue: Dapples can vary in color on different areas of the body, something especially relevant for rosegreys. So look for hue, tone, tint, saturation, and value in each dapple as it relates to its neighbors in order to pinpoint the right color for that specific dapple. 

Intensity: Dapples can vary in brightness during different phases of the pattern or over different areas of the body so pay attention to which ones are brighter or more subdued. 

Detail: Dapples can be rich in little details like branching, mottling, “ghost trails,” diffusion, and graininess so look for the little things that add so much interest. 

Dapples tend to have a crystalline-like structure and fit together reminiscent of jigsaw pieces. This is because of the structure of the heat-sink capillary networks that tend to be the generators of the dapples themselves. As such, they tend to be most intensely pale in their middles to diffuse outwardly into the surrounding dark network. Dapples can have a pattern with the hair growth, too, especially in the flank and loin area. Also notice that dapples are often quite different in type on different regions of the body. In other words, we really can’t apply the same type of dapple to the shoulder as we did to the barrel as we did to the pectorals, for example, so pay attention to references. 

The forearms, gaskins, and sometimes the lower haunch can have “sunbursts” and “lightning streaks,” or white hairs forming streaks radiating outward in a burst or branch-like fashion, criss-crossing the areas. “Ghost trails” are also thin trails of light hairs that can connect dapples together so look for those as well in references, especially on the shoulder and neck. “Shadow trails” are swaths of dark color that arc over the body, remnants of the dark portions that are shrinking. Also look for “wash outs” of white, or areas of white diffusion into the dappled areas that will soften or break up the dark networks encasing the dapples. Additionally, the lower leg tendons can be lighter while the coronets can be rimmed in light hairs as “bracelets.” Streaking and patchiness can also occur throughout the lower leg, especially in medium dapple greys. However, dark point color tends to stick to the joint areas most often even as the horse greys out. 

Markings and patterns become more diffuse into the grey coat as the pattern develops, most notably on the legs and face, with the exception of muzzle markings which tend to remain more or less crisp. 

The color of the mane, tail, and feathers are subject to a lot of variation so pay attention to them in references and life study. In this, rosegreys tend to have the most arresting variations, some even having flaxen or bold rust-colored manes and tails! 

Study lots of photos and do field study up close to learn the nuances of the pattern. Indeed, a hefty mental library for dapple grey helps us draw from its commonalities as well as infuse eccentricities and details that add novelty and authenticity to our paint job. Indeed, it’s important that each of our dapple grey paintjobs be distinctive since the pattern in life is as unique as a fingerprint. 

Conclusion to Part I 

Clearly mimicking a convincing dapple grey isn’t as straightforwards as it would first seem, is it? There’s loads more to it than first meets the eye! But therein lies so many treasures for us, gifts that can take us on a wonderful journey of discovery, progress, and fascination. In this way, learning to better paint a dapple grey can unlock so many other skills and fire up our gumption and inspiration in novel new ways. And once we come out the other side having succeeded, we’ll have gained a newfound confidence and clarity in our abilities, the true gift this pattern has to offer us. 

So in Part II let’s continue the discussion with more ideas on rendering this complicated pattern with more believability to get one step closer to our lofty painting goals. Until Part II then, delight in dappling to explore the wonderful world of color, effect, and pattern to discover our true artistic potential! 

“Great art picks up where nature ends.” 

— Marc Chagall

I’d like to thank both Lesli Kathman of The Equine Tapestry and Lynn Cassels-Caldwell of Snowdrift Studio for the use of their photos in this blog series. Thank you gobs, gals! You helped the really dapple up this blog series in the best way! Thank you!

Dazzled By Dapples Part I