Bernese Mountain Dog Portrait in Progress

Today I worked on this portrait of Kassie, a very sweet Bernese Mountain Dog. This is the second Kassie portrait for me. A few years back, I did a scratchboard portrait of Kassie in a realistic style (below). The new portrait is in my "Paintings with Petzazz" interpretive style - bright vibrant colors with a limited palette painted in watercolor on Yupo (a synthetic paper). The color on the real portrait is a bit different than what you see here - I took a photo of it, and the lighting wasn't that great. I fought with the color correction for a while and then I said "to heck with it" and let it go, so you'll have to use your imagination a bit. The background is bright orange, but there's more variety of tone/color than what's showing here. The orangey-pink tones on her face are really a vibrant magenta. Most of the part that's white now will be various shades of purple and purple-blue. Her throat & chest are white, but I'm using shades of light purple for the shadows; she also has a white muzzle and a "blaze" running down from the top of her head (you can see all that in the realistic portrait). Even though the colors are a bit off, at least you can see Kassie's wonderful, happy personality! I'll post a better scan of the final portrait after I finish it later this month.

The realistic portrait was done in ink on scratchboard to the point where it was finished, but then I used a bit of watercolor to tint her caramel colored "points", tongue and eyes. The effect reminds me a bit of a hand-tinted black & white photo.