I met up with my friend, Diane, on Saturday. She called me because she wanted to give me something (very mysterious). We went to a preview of How to Train Your Dragon – The Hidden World first. It’s cute, the animation is great, the plot is a little too predictable, and the twins – Ruffnut and Tuffnut- are in excellent form. Children will love it. Lots of laugh out loud moments, and maybe there’s even a little bit of tear-jerkery going on, too. No spoilers: I have grandchildren who will want to see this first.
I dropped Diane off at her home and she presented me with the surprise, but not before telling me that it was something I “would need to fix.”
It’s acrylic on canvas with a great big white blotch in the horse’s ears. Diane stated that she couldn’t wait to see what I would do with it, so I must assume she didn’t think I was merely going to fix that white blotch.
She’d be right. That horse.
I’ll admit to a bit of cheating here – I pulled up a horse photo in about the same pose on the Interwebs to use as my model for fixing this. Surprisingly, the horse on the canvas isn’t TOO far off.
The head needed to be longer and the ears needed to be repositioned, and the eye re-sized and correctly placed. Unfortunately, I can’t black out the old ears, so we’ll have to pretend they are shadows in the stall. I can come close to the browns. It’s a rough outline that needs a lot more work but now that I have it outlined in acrylic on the canvas, I’m rather excited by the challenge. I’ll try to stay true to the original (I don’t want to repaint the entire thing!), but I’ll also try to make the horse more life-like.
No promises.
Stay tuned.
Jaci Dawn 
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