Fortune

May I introduce Hilda, and her new hunter for the 1893 season, grey gelding Fortune. The companion piece to Valiant, where we see her husband Samson aboard his own favourite horse - I've reworked the background to an autumnal colour and slightly different piece of ground so she can pose neatly at a halt. 
Hilda is Amyas's mother, and if he gets his nose and a hint of similarity about the eyes from his father, his colouring is all from his mother's side - blonde and bright bright blue! She's a keen horsewoman, in fact that is how she met Samson, and her fierce determination to outride him at every opportunity was what made him decide he had to marry her This portrait, like the matching one, is a flashback to the first year of their marriage, well before little Amyas - if I want to draw him on a pony to complete the family, it'll have to be set about six years later, heh.

Fortune is very young here, at the age of five this will be his first season riding out with the hunt - I chose a dappled grey for the added interest of how he would change over the years, so I can draw him anything from dark to a pure white-grey in his old age when he's lounging about having a fat'n'happy retirement with Horatio and the others. He's a kind-tempered horse, very easygoing and with a tendancy to laziness when bored during exercise or schooling, but can gallop and jump with the best of them when his blood's up and the chase is on! Hilda loves him dearly, not least because he was her wedding present from a certain horse-mad husband-to-be

As with the picture of Valiant, the horse and rider were drawn and coloured using GIMP, the previous background was reworked and added to using MyPaint (though this time I did also edit the colour balance using GIMP to get the autumn look).