Pastel and animal coats were made for each other, and the reason is mechanical rather than sentimental.
Fur is a soft edge with colour running through it. You cannot draw it hair by hair or it turns into wire. What you can do in pastel is lay the colour down, then break the edge of it with a finger or a stump, so it stops being a shape and starts being something that would move if you touched it. That single gesture is most of the work.
Three of them here.
Colorful Horses
Three horses, heads together, manes running across the picture in long strokes. The horses read as white, and there is almost no white in them: they are built out of lavender, pale pink, grey-blue and a warm cream where the light lands, set against a deep blue that pushes all of it forward.
That is the trick with a white animal. Paint it white and it goes flat and chalky. Paint it as every colour that is reflecting onto it and it reads as white anyway, but it is alive.
The manes are the loosest thing I have painted and I left them that way on purpose. See the original.
Brown Cow
Close in on the face, ears out sideways, that soft brown going to cream around the muzzle and up over the brow. Young cattle have a particular expression which is mostly to do with how large the ears are relative to everything else, and the painting is cropped tight to keep it.
The field behind is barely there, a green suggestion with no detail in it at all, because anything more would pull attention off the face.
Mom Love
A giraffe bringing her head down towards her calf, the two necks crossing, warm orange patterning against deep green. Giraffe markings are a gift in pastel because they are not a pattern printed on a surface, they are patches of colour with soft edges, which is exactly what the medium does without being asked.
This is the one I would choose for a child room, and it holds up there because it is not cute. It is just two animals standing close together.
There is a fourth animal piece I showed you earlier this month, and it is doing something stranger than any of these: Bear, which is a grizzly and a mountain range sharing one outline.
One original of each. The rest is in the gallery.
— DawnE