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Horse Portrait Contest

Okay my devoted bloggers. I have a challenge for those of you interested! I will be giving away one free  8" x 10" painting of your horse to one lucky reader. It will be acrylic on canvas. I cannot tell you when it will be finished, but sometime in January. But hey, it's free, so perhaps worth the wait?



1. Email me a high resolution photo of your horse (no people). You may send in more than one submission.  Email is dock (dot) start (at) gmail (dot) com.
2. You must own full copyright privileges of the photo. This is easy if you took it yourself. However, if it is a professional photo you need to get permission from the photographer for me to make a painting of it. I need this in writing (email). I will likely be using a slide/scan of the finished painting in the future to advertise my work. Most photographers in my experience are okay with this so long as they are asked up front.
3. The photo must have a lot of contrast. Light/dark shadows, etc.

The winner will be chosen by what I deem to be the best photo to make a painting of and once it is done I will mail you your painting. You do however need to cover the cost of shipping. A small painting like this should cost less than $10 to ship safely. We will sort all that out later once the painting is finished and ready to go.

Okay, so now you are wondering what your painting might look like and if I'm any good at this? Well, before I got realistic about life and an income and went to grad school, I completed and undergrad degree in painting. So you can say that I do know how to paint, although it is not my profession these days. I've painted a few horse paintings over the years more or less during times when I was lacking inspiration to paint something "serious" (see below). Well, time has passed and I only paint for fun now. So I've decided that it doesn't matter to me any more if the art community considers horse paintings serious art or not. I want to paint horses so I'm going to! What is new to me though is painting in acrylics.  I've always painted with oils. However, since I can only paint in my dining room with JR running around the house and the fact that there is lack of ventilation options due to it being winter, my only option is to paint in acrylics (non-toxic). One day when JR is older (or I have an art studio in my home) I will return to my beloved toxic fume laden oils. So, you my lucky blog contest winner will be the first horse painting I've done in acrylic. Don't fret, it isn't my first acrylic painting though. I think I'm up to about seven acrylic paintings now. Basically at some point I decided I can't just not paint because of JR, so I reluctantly decided to embrace acrylics. It's kinda like being a pick up rider instead of owning your own horse. You still get the horse fix but it's not quite as satisfying.

Now send in those entries!
