This painting was to be a secret birthday present .

The original photo wasn’t good enough to use and we couldn’t get any new ones.

We managed to find a suitable photo of another horse & rider, changed the colour of the horse and placed the most suitable face of Grant from the photos we had on the other riders body.

A portrait will always be  better with clear original reference photographs but this shows you what can be done if this isn’t possible.

The original action photo – lovely pose but no detail in the horse or rider. You can’t see the anatomy or face .

The original unusable reference photo

A closer view. I couldn’t  use it to create the  portrait .

A suitable photo if I change the horses colour and customise everything.

Now to find a suitable photo of Grant’s face at the right angle.

The face we managed to use in the portrait

We used the action shot of another rider & horse and I added the horses feet that were cropped off in the original photo and changed the horses colour.

We placed the most suitable face we had of Grant onto the rider. The face had to be of an angle that would look as natural as possible on that body. The one we found was blurry but we had to make do.

So not an ideal situation but it all came together in the end!