384 - Kennedy Pleats

I was born and raised in Fort Yates, North Dakota. I grew up on a small ranch in the country with my grandparents, whose Hobbies were creating. This meant I was exposed to many mediums of art, so naturally I combined my love for the two– art and animals into what is now one of my favorite hobbies–painting, especially painting horses.!

A couple weeks before we started this project we were asked to incorporate the theme of food sovereignty. When choosing the food and plants we decided to incorporate choke cherries and Wild Prairie roses. We built on each other's strengths. My mentor artist Alex’s strength is floral design, and my strength is with drawing horse anatomy, so we decided to add the portrait of the horse in the Forefront to honor the horse nation with this mural.

When we first started with the mural, we just started by sketching things out. Alex, my mentor, showed me this technique called scribble line work and we just basically went in and we were putting random scribbles. We did the alphabet like random places, or we would put our initials, or just weird shapes.

Then she took a picture of that after the whole wall was covered and then she input it into a program called Procreate, and then she put our line art on top of that, so that was our whole guide for in one line let's see the horses eye was over a scribble of like a circle and we could see exactly where those lines hit and that's how we knew where to fill in and connect, and where we would leave it blank. In the meantime, I went all in on the horse, and I started at the bottom, and then went to the head because I was I just didn’t want to mess up the head! So while I was working on the head, she was working on the roses in the bottom corner, and we basically just went back and forth from side to side. I continued to mainly focus on the horse, and after she got the roses and the cherries done, she focused on the background. The whole process was super fun and I hope you like it!