NaMoPaiMo Progress

I've been light on posting because at the moment most of my hobby time and energy id going it to my NaMo project.

I've always wanted to be a model horse artist - I want to do it all! Customize, finishwork, make tack and props, sculpt, glaze, all the things! Unfortunately I also have Former Gifted Child Syndrome and I get frustrated and defeated if I'm not immediately good at something. I know logically that you have to bad at something in order to become good at it - but it is hard to embrace that in practice.

It's one of the reasons I love NaMoPaiMo, because it's a month dedicated to painting a model no matter where you are in the skills universe and doing it together with so many other people really makes it fun and encouraging. Also the deadline to both start and finish really help my procrastinational tendencies.

Granted last year I succumbed to my inner critic and when the vision that I had in my head wasn't immediately coming to fruition (after spending probably only an hour on my horse) I got frustrated and gave up. My plan was extremely ambitious and I put too much pressure on myself. This year I am determined just to have fun and learn and move forward no matter what. I retreated back to my comfort zone of (primarily) acrylics and appaloosa patterns and I decided to paint a mini to make it feel a little more manageable and portable.

So far so good - I'm 5 days in I'm enjoying it! I'm happy with my progress so far and embracing the progress not perfection mindset.

Day 1: First layers going down - one goal I do have is to try to get a nice smooth finish so I'm doing many many (so many) thin coats of white. I'm not sure I've even done enough but I know I'll be doing some more on top once the spots are on.

Day 2: Spots going on! I like to draw the pattern on first with a pencil and then color the spots in. I do a little section at a time like this to focus carefully on my reference photos

Day 3: More spots going down and starting to layer in some of the darker areas. I'm pretty happy with the pattern and I've left off his face for now because I haven't decided yet if I want to go really dark or mostly light with spots. TBD.

Day 4: Second layer of color on the spots - starting to look like something, but also still a long way to go.