This painting – “After the race” is an oil portrait of ex jockey A.P. McCoy, this was my first large scale oil painting (79.5×120 cm) so I decided to show you a few pictures of the process. This is another painting for my series “In the Jockeys’ Room” in this series I’m trying to capture a bit of the atmosphere of the behind the scenes of this sport, the intensity, strength and obsession that takes to be a top horse jockey. And who better than A.P. to personify all that.

I started off by sketching out the figures and background with burnt umber oil paint and turpentine, after that I added shadows and defined the dimensions so that once this layer dried I could start painting over it with oil paint and a mixture of turpentine and linseed oil.

I started by painting the background and the figures on top of that so that I wouldn’t have to paint around the figures and mess up finer details. As I painted each figure I would touch up parts of the background that didn’t seem quite right.

In the last image you can see the finished painting in my studio and have a better idea of its size.