Four Horsemen of the apocalypse

This is one of my later works, the four horsemen of the apocalypse. It ended up being a pretty large artwork with a size of 36” x 48”. The time it took me to plan the painting dwarfed the amount of time it actually took to paint it. I had a few pages sketched out for the composition in my black construction paper sketchbook, and they ended up sitting there for a pretty long while before I actually came around to painting it. The large wall art only ended up taking about 10 hours to paint.

It took a bit of thinking to decide how I was going to approach each horseman’s color, as the black background I use for most of my work limited me in terms of what I could use. The blue/turquoise horseman which is pestilence is historically a black horse but it would not have shown up against the background had I done that. The green horse in the back which is death, was made that color because pale was actually an antiquated term for green and with a quick google search the colors are “white, red, black and pale” for the four horsemen. In addition to this, the rider conquest was already on a white horse. After getting the horsemen figured out I decided to go with purple for the ground so that it contrasted from the myriad of colors of the horsemen. I faded the ground towards the back of the painting so the depth was more convincing but this was still not one of my best works in terms of creating it. Overall the objective of the painting was to create chaotic movement which it does achieve well.