I took a photo of an Assateague island pony a couple of years ago, and have been wanting to try to paint it. Here is the photo:

A couple of weeks ago I pulled up the photo on my phone and tried to sketch it. Over and over again, unsuccessfully. I haven’t tried to draw an animal in a long time, and it was way harder than I remembered. I had to give up.

At the art class I attended two days ago, the instructor taught us an easy way to graph a photo to sketch it. First, you find the middle point of the photo. You draw a line vertically and then horizontally through it, then from corner to corner, diagonally. Then you draw a diamond connecting the outer points of the vertical and horizontal lines, then you draw vertical and horizontal lines through the points where the diamond lines and diagonal lines cross. Sounds complicated, but it was really easy, and as the instructor pointed out, you only have to measure for the first set of lines. Here’s my gridded pony photo (printed on my home printer on regular printer paper):

I pulled out a sheet of pastel paper and drew a grid the same way. Then I tried again to draw the pony. It was so much easier, comparing grid blocks to get the shape of the pony right.

I have begun to fill in with color, using artistic license to change the background.

Obviously it’s still far from finished and needs lots of tweaking–my version looks more pony-ish than in the photo.

But I’ve decided to leave it for now and wait until our next class, next week, for more guidance from our helpful instructor 😊