This is a good painting to encourage you to use tonal skills. You will only use black and white and pink in this painting, so you have not got a lot to go on. This is pure black, not a chromatic, I used Mars black. This is an interesting study of negative space and positive space. Make a light pencil stroke line drawing: if not, your pencil marks will show through the paint. 

I painted in the dark black space first to make this as easy as possible. I worked on the head first, and painted in the eyes and then the black on the coat. I then used a rose madder (weakest tone) to paint in the pink on the nose and chest. I used very watery washes of my black for the back of the head and for the negative spaces between the hairs of the mane. 

I painted in the background using a very weak wash of black. I enhanced the mane by using Chinese white.

The painting took one hour to complete.