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!
