Art brings me joy. I wouldn't be an artist if it didn't. But like everybody else in the world, I have a life outside of my art. I won't bore anybody with many of the details here, but sometimes life gets busy, and it becomes difficult to juggle life and art. 

I think the hardest part about being an artist isn't the skill required to draw. That's sometime that comes with time, patience, and practice. The hardest part for me is finding a way to push past the things life throws at me and continue drawing, even when the drawings stubbornly refuse to let me finish them.

Horses. Yes. I'll admit it. I was that cliché horse-crazy girl who sketched horses in all of her notebooks, carried around horse binders, wore horse shirts, etc.

When I was a kid, I lived and breathed horses. I grew up on a small fifteen acre farm that had horses, I rode my first horse when I was two, and I got my first horse when I was seven. When I wasn't riding and competing in 4-H in the summer, I was drawing horses, reading about horses, and watching horses on TV. There has never been a time in my life where I wasn't around horses,, so it's no small wonder that horses would end up integrated so deeply into my artwork. 

Many artists, myself included, enjoy the challenge of trying new things. 2015 seems to be my year of that. I knew going into the year thanks to my brief jump into pen and ink that I wanted to stay with colored pencil art. What I didn't know, however, was whether or not I wanted to stick with the paper I had been using (Arches Hot Press Watercolor) or even the pencils (Prismacolor). 

I decided to start with Art Spectrum Colourfix Paper. I had heard it reviewed before and actually had a nice stockpile of it from a few years ago, though I never tried it before this project. Colourfix is a basic watercolor paper with an acrylic primer (the bonus being that it's lightfast). Most importantly, the paper is durable, which is vital for me and my heavy hand. While browsing references for my previous piece, I found one that would translate wonderfully onto the Colourfix.