What a Horse Taught Me About How I Make Pictures

Reckoning

In my last post, I described my picture-making process as sequential: beginning with ideation, then testing visual structure, and finally rendering the idea. I thought I understood it. I didn't. I punted last time, not just in saving the third step for a later post, but about all of it.

Let me pick up where I left off and see what a horse taught me about how I actually make pictures.

The Year of the Fire Horse

I recently gave myself a project: to make a series of posters for the Chinese Year of the Fire Horse. Each image must embody something of the fire horse — power, expansion, freedom — while also showing its impact on me.

I'm an Earth sign in the Chinese zodiac. What caught my attention is that Earth is produced by Fire. Energy becomes matter. The intangible becomes tangible. Ideas become structure. Process becomes product.

Perfect for 2026. A way to explore transformation, not just as a concept, but as something tangible the Fire Horse could do to me, to the way I make pictures.

And it's happening already.

The Beginning of the End

This first horse started in the sketchbook, per my process. Soon, with a simple idea about the horse's power breaking through constraint and a thumbnail in hand, I was ready to execute the finish.

I looked through my prepared papers (ink, paint, trace monotype textures) for something that would kick-start the energy in the idea. I pulled out a few candidates; they had movement, horse shapes, and color. Then, boom, there it was. An 8 x 12-inch deep-red paper with greens, gold, blue, and white acrylic paint on it.

Fire! The horse's head was coming straight at me out of the complexity, staring me straight in the eyes. Here I am.

The image chased away all my initial thumbnails. In an instant, my picture-making process reversed direction. This first layer revealed the horse's character and provided the composition in one step.

The question was whether this new direction would serve the Fire Horse series' concept.

The color and texture of this first layer suggested the Fire Horse's bold, self-possessed energy. This will do.

From there, I moved into the end phase. I found photo references to inform the composition. I scanned the first layer into Procreate and worked digitally to avoid ruining the original right out of the gate. Once I had a digital image I liked, I returned to the original paper and followed roughly the same steps.

Right now, I'm experimenting with the first layer. In the Fire Horse image, the first layer provided abstraction. The ink and pastels organized values, edges, and hierarchy, with the intent of revealing the Fire Horse's essential qualities.

The digital picture did this more successfully, I think. Both are done. Finishing has been out of reach in the past. I've had ideas I couldn't technically resolve. Having skills to get there now — traditionally and digitally — is a relief.

The first layer did the work.

Responding to what's already on the page, rather than preparing a paper to serve a predetermined design, is obviously generative. I'm delighted. But I'm also left with the question: What's enough of an underlying concept for the Fire Horse to move on to material-led design, composition, and image-making? Enough to allow me to be consistent and problem-solve successfully?

Dropping one composition for another wouldn't have worked for a client. However, expecting one thing and receiving another does rather well for this self-generated series. It's exciting. The Fire Horse makes me want to stay with my own middle phase longer. To test, to turn things around, to learn what the materials can do. To approach the work from both directions. Take the time to do what the image needs, not just finish faster.

I started by describing my process as sequential. I was wrong. It isn't sequential, and it isn't circular either.

It's a bridge from words and concepts toward images, and from my materials (ink, paint, pastels) back toward images that generate meaning.

Pictures are built from two directions, meeting somewhere in the middle.

I find myself not waiting for the idea to be finished in my sketchbook. I'm moving into materials earlier and letting the first layer propose an idea back.

That's where I am now. Uncomfortably comfortable.