Starting One of My Horses

Well, I've finally started one of the horses!  I changed my mind about starting on one of the Traditional ponies I was working on and picked up one of the smaller horses.  I have 2 of these in-between size horses and I decided to use one of them.  Since the only thing I'm planning on doing is learning how to color these horses I'm going to start small.  I put a base coat of Gesso mixed with acrylic paint.  I put probably 6 coats of this mix on the horse.  It's a lightly tinted color.  I let the base coat dry and then I used some thing that I found in one of the JAH magazines I bought.  When I read the article about using pastels I found out that the person who wrote the article used shaved pastel to color her horses.  I had tried to do it the way I had seen it done on the DVD but it didn't seem to work for me.  When I tried it by shaving the pastel it worked out pretty well.  I will have to do a few more layers, but I'm really excited about this.  Now I just have to be patient with myself.  I hope this works for me.  We'll see.