Knightshade - black stallion painting in progress.

This is my current painting in progress. I acquired the ref from another artist friend who took it herself. We did a swap with her having some photos from me that I took of Sleet and Wren which she wants to paint. I gave the horse a new background. In the photo, he was just playing in a field with green grass, and some sort of barn/shed behind him and trees. I've always wanted to do a painting like this where the shadowed side of the horse sort of blends into the shade although there will be some very faint blue highlights on that side just to give it a little extra life. The ground looks sort of blurry and manky in the photos. A lot of detail seems to be lost. It looks a lot better in the flesh.
In the first photo, I have painted in the background and I'm still working on the highlighted part of the ground. The horse has masking fluid around him to maintain the general outline.
I have done more work on the ground and now that I don't have to paint around the horse, I have removed the masking fluid.

Here, I have used a black watercolour pencil (WCP) I basically just coloured all the darker areas and then with a wet brush, wetted it all down and blended it out a little.

In this next one, I added some colours using WCP and some more black with coloured pencil (CP). I wetted the coloured WCP in and then I started on the acrylic. I added some black to some of the dark areas, faint white to the highlights although they will have more of a creamy tinge once done and some browns and ochres. I'll add more blues later. No focus on detail as of yet. Just messy underpainting.

More updates coming soon.