Sami Portrait

Just finished an ink on scratchboard portrait of Sami, the yellow lab.

Her owner provided a couple of photos and I chose to work with this one.



I rotated it slightly counter-clockwise to level out the angle of her head (that's why the upper left corner is missing). And then cropped it to the 6"x6" format her owner and I decided upon.



Then I converted the color photo to greyscale to give me a better reference for the tones.



Here's the only in-progress scan I made:



And the final portrait:



Notice that I darkened the really brightly sun-lit areas on Sami so they would show up against the white background. It's important when working from photos not to copy them exactly. I find that I'm always making artistic judgement calls when creating portraits. Even a realistically rendered portrait is an interpretation.