20: Experiment #13 - Parade Ring

One of the drawings I wanted to do all year of Cheltenham races but never managed was a view of the parade ring including both horses and a variety of spectators. It's impossible to get the angle, for one thing, and spectators tend to be facing the wrong way - i.e. looking at the horses, so you just get a load of hats staring back at you. Which could be a good picture for the right sort of illustrator, I suppose, but I wanted some faces. The closest I got were the following drawings: 

I also combined a couple of drawings for one of the screen prints I made for the FMP: 

I wanted to come at it from a different angle, as if you were looking down on the parade ring at a sort of 45 degree angle, and include a cross-section of Cheltenham 'types' including some of the characters I'd been working on for the project thus far. I came up with this: 

I introduced some tone with hatching and some splatter. The mistake I made here is with the fingerprint shading on the horse - this makes it look like a piebald, which you never see as they're not thoroughbred racing horses, even though there is one in Hidalgo. 

To rectify the horse section, I stencilled out the area and added some ink splatter shading, which made it look like he's coming back from the race - perhaps explaining the look on the jockey's face - it's evidently muddy ground. This also has the effect of differentiating the horse and rider from the rest of the scene:

I felt that to go all out and paint in the various shades of beige being likely worn by the punters would be too much. I felt that a spot colour, like with the previous experiment and also my FMP screen prints, could work with the line drawing. Spot colour is an old trick mainly to do with conserving ink and thus money in printing, but is still widely used. The Canadian illustrator Isabelle Arsenault is fond of using spot or limited colour as a way of highlighting and differentiating certain elements of her mostly pencil drawings:

The Cheltenham yellow colour would do the job of the beige and create quite a bold impact I felt.
I rolled an A3 page with acrylic paint, then scanned this and isolated some areas with photoshop:

I tried out various photoshop filters, as is the eternal temptation:

I wasn't that pleased with these, and felt there'd be a stronger sense of design with a flat area of colour: 

This is a slight variant with some grey, almost veering into blue:

Some variants:

I think these two are my favourites:

This experiment represented a bit of a change for me as it's a fairly involved drawing in more of a graphic novel or commercial style. I enjoyed trying to fit in some of the characters I'd observed at various points during the year, as well as invent a few new ones. I'm not sure who the jockey is; he looks a bit shell-shocked. The guy in the bottom left came to talk to me when I was drawing on Ladies Day during the Festival and he was interested in the young ladies I was drawing, so I put him next to a nice young lady. There are some blokes with Guinness just above them. The couple in the top left standing over the rail I saw getting happily drunk at the bloodstock auction I went to earlier in the season. The old granny in the bottom right I caught sulking after a race at the January meeting. I'm not sure what comes across to the observer who doesn't know these (exciting) connections but I hope there's a fair amount of narrative happening in the picture.