Dog Portraits in Progress

All of my pet portrait subjects are special - they have people who really love them and want their likenesses captured as art - but these two subjects are special to me personally. The first one is Red, an Australian Cattle Dog (ACD - aka Australian Comfort Dog) who belongs to my good friend Sandy. She adopted him from an ACD rescue group and I was with her when she picked him up many years ago. Red's a handsome, photogenic guy and I've been wanting to do a portrait of him for Sandy for a long time.





The other dog is Sammy, another rescue who had a really, really rough start, but now lives with his Kind Friend who loves him dearly and has done an amazing job teaching him that a dog's life is supposed to be a good one. Sammy, his Kind Friend and his Best Friend (a standard poodle) have been out to our place a few times, most recently to my art show. I started the portrait just prior to the show and Sandy took this photo of Sammy and his portrait.




I've made a little more progress since the show.



Sammy has an enchanting blog - read about his adventures and what his early days with his Kind Friend were like. Click here to read Sammy's blog post about one of their visits to our place.

Both of these portraits are on the 4" x 4" watercolor Art Board panels. For what you see here, I've used ink (just black on Sammy's; black, sepia & brown on Red's) and watercolor. After I finish with the watercolor, I'll add final detail with color pencil. On Sammy's I also used white color pencil around the edges to preserve the wisps of hair so that I didn't have to be super careful to paint around them with the blue background. Where blue paint did overlap the white, I was easily able to lift it off the waxy pencil with a damp brush.