Proof that a pony can surf...

Hello there, how are you doing this fine Friday? This week, I’m comfortably writing the blog post on my laptop, and not in my car in a hotel car park an hour’s drive away from home! I’ve had a busy week (I’m starting to wonder if I’ll ever have a quiet week again) with lots of delivering and driving and also a busy time in the shops too. As little Anglesey is gearing up for Summer, the tourists start coming over and from now on until probably October or thereabouts, Anglesey is in full swing and the busiest it will be all year. Before I dive into this week’s post, let me first tell you that we have hopefully found our new home! It isn’t quite official yet and if we do succeed in securing it, we won’t be moving in for at least a month but I have absolutely got my heart set on this place, which is likely not a wise choice but nonetheless, I am extremely excited and impatient for the boring technicalities to be over with so I can have the keys and dance around in the empty rooms of our little cottage. I’ll keep you posted! I might even give you an empty-house-sneaky-tour before we properly move in with all our bits and bobs…

However, that’s all in the future but I’d like to talk to you this week about something I’ve been working on for a little while now, a very fun commission...the secret project, however, must remain a secret for a little while longer, sorry to have to tease you but you'll have to be patient for another week or maybe more. Back to the commission, it was one of the deliveries I made this week and certainly one of the more unique commissions I’ve worked on! I was contacted by someone who mentioned that she had a miniature shetland pony that she would like a commission of.

Pwtan, the pony, was rescued from being a ‘party pony,’ in which she was rented out for parties to have her hair plaited and decorated. She is cheeky and playful with a heart of gold and lives happily now with her other miniature pony family. The lady who commissioned this portrait of Pwtan wanted me to capture her mischievous and adventurous nature, and as such would like Pwtan to be depicted on a surfboard! Well, if a puffin can row a boat, I’m certainly not one to say that a pony can’t surf! As usual, I started out with a sketch to show the client before moving onto the stage of painting, and once she was happy it was time to get messy with the paints.

One of my favourite things to paint is choppy and splashy water, it’s so much fun to try to capture and I love painting with the colours of the sea.

Once I’d done this, I again sent a work-in-progress picture along to the client to make sure everything was going according to plan because again, my priority is always to make sure I’m capturing exactly what a client wants from their commission. It was then time to add the background, which we hadn’t discussed in too much detail to begin with, and so we went through a few options before deciding to see if the background of Moelfre bay would work. Initially my client wanted to incorporate the Menai Bridge in the background but unfortunately the perspective of the piece wasn’t quite suited for that and as the paint was already down on the pony and the water, it was too late to change. Instead, I mocked up a digital and very rough version of Moelfre in the background to see if that was suitable, and with her permission and approval, I went ahead and added in the background of the quaint and pretty village of Moelfre. I tried to keep the background quite simplistic because the main focus is Pwtan in all her glory, and so I painted these parts with watercolour and made sure to keep the colours from becoming too bold, so the foreground of the water, surfboard and Pwtan herself were the prime focus.

(Digital mock-up)

Once I had finished the background, all that was left to do was add some more detail to Pwtan’s face. I wanted to try to get her looking as cheeky and cute as she does in real life. She also has beautiful eyes, one brown and one blue, and as you can only see one in the painting I wanted to super-duper-triple-ultra check I had the right one the right way around! Little details like this may seem inconsequential but I know that if someone got those details wrong about one of my little furry babies then I’d be less than happy, so I certainly hope I got her right!

I hope that I captured her likeness and I’d like to thank Pwtan and her owner for letting me write this blog post about the commission! That’s all from me this week folks, thanks for reading and as always, I’ll catch you next week! Rachel x