Honey

"This is Honey. She is a three-legged therapy dog who visits nursing homes, hospitals, hospice homes, rehab centers, schools, day care facilities, and much more. She teaches people with and without special needs that being different is okay, and encourages others to overcome whatever challenges they may be facing. She is a rescue dog who came to us from an abusive home. Honey has added so much joy to so many lives! She is a Spitz mix."

Honey finished

Some semi-random stuff...

I'd say it's about time I updated my blog, so here you go.

 (Reference photo below)

Well I've finished another portrait. I don't have a name for this little guy, but I sure had fun painting him!
I recently had a little contest on my facebook page for working dogs, and will be giving away an 8x10 acrylic painting (like the one above) to the three winners. Below are pictures of the three winning dogs:

If you're interested in reading about the jobs these dogs do, visit my facebook page *here* and go to either the event "win a free 8x10 painting of your working dog" or the photo album with the same title. I can't wait to get started on these special dogs!

That's all I have for now. School has been keeping me pretty busy lately, but hopefully I won't continue to be so neglectful of my poor blog...after all, the semester is almost over! Yaaay!!

Sadie

This is a post about my latest commission, Sadie. As you can see, Sadie is an adorable, much loved little poodle, and my acrylic painting was ordered for an anniversary gift.

I got 4 really tiny camera phone pictures, and was asked to do an 8x10 painting. Now, I greatly appreciate any business, but please, if you're going to send pictures for me to do a portrait from, try to have at least one good quality picture. I can sometimes work from tiny pictures like these, but it makes my job a whole lot harder. 

 This last one (Directly below) is the one that was requested for the actual painting. Wonderful, considering it's the smallest and most blurry of all the pictures right? Not exactly, but don't get me wrong. Sadie is an adorable dog and I enjoyed painting her. Even if the result wasn't able to be a super detailed painting.

 Sketched:

 Mostly done, We were having some cushion problems:

 The cushion fixed, and Sadie finally finished:

Yellow chick + Yellow dog = Most adorable picture ever

This is Jed and his matching chicken:

Several days ago, this rather adorable chick was part of a magic show. The magician said he was going to show us where chickens came from, and proceeded to crack an egg into a metal pan. Then he sprayed lighter fluid all over the cracked egg, and lit it all on fire. He set that down and let it cook for a little while, and then put the lid on the pan, and quickly took it off again. There, flapping in the pan, was this adorable little chick. We somehow got lucky enough to bring it home and have since been quite entertained by it's "I own everything" personality.

New Portrait finished

I am pleased to introduce to you "Lexy and Oakly" a lovable Husky and Border Collie pair from (and now headed back to) Hampton VA! This is an 11x14 Colored Pencil drawing.

In the original photo, the husky wasn't really looking at the camera. The client wanted Lexy (the husky) to be looking more at the camera, so I did "a bit" of editing in my drawing...
This was the original photo:

 But I swapped heads with this picture of Lexy:

That's all for now...

Tracking

A human's nose has 5 to 6 million olfactory receptors. A dog's nose has over 220 million. Why then, do I continually find so unbelievable to watch Abbi follow a track with her nose?

I began teaching Abbi to track late last fall. I've never been too serious about teaching it...as long as she gets to the end of the track approximately the same way I laid it, I'm happy with her. If we were training for a competition, I would train her to track very carefully and precisely, making tight turns and staying right on top of the track at all times, but since we never plan to compete, I don't really worry about her rather sloppy way of tracking. I think of it more as a fun and hopefully useful hobby that we both enjoy immensely. I started teaching her by giving her short tracks of about 10 feet to work...with a piece of food in every single one of my footsteps. then I started lengthening the track, then leaving food out of a footstep every so often, and finally adding turns.  Of course, she learned incredibly fast (as always) and although she isn't weaned off of food completely yet, she is doing fantastic. She's starting to pass me up actually - that is, she's gotten to the point where even if I've forgotten where exactly I've laid the track, I can trust her to follow it. I'll try to get a video of her tracking and upload it on here soon...

What I really need to do is train Jed to track. He actually is much better with his nose than Abbi...He has much more of a natural instinct to track. Haha, I've been thinking if I taught him to track, he could help me find Abbi when she runs off :P

Flowers and a New Camera

Last month, I graduated from High School. Two weeks ago, my parents gave me my graduation present: A Cannon EOS Rebel T2i dSLR camera!! Wowie!!

 For someone who has never owned any sort of camera, (well except for an ancient little film camera that was passed down from one of my older sisters that I had when I was like, six....does that really count? ) a dSLR is just a tad overwhelming! How did I get this lucky?! In just two weeks (which includes the time before I even got a memory card) I've taken over 1000 pictures. Something tells me that I am going to need an external hard drive for my computer if I plan on keeping this up :P

So anyway, I get an awesome camera, take half a ton of pictures, yada, yada, yada....don't you want to see some of them? Don't worry...I won't put all of them up ;) But I did take some pretty flower pictures today that you might enjoy:

(ok, so that one wasn't a flower picture :P )

Meet Simon:

The Beagle/Lab mix who has a very lovable white tip on the end of his tail.

Of course, we couldn't leave that out, so we had to move his tail out from behind his body just a bit :)

This drawing is just a 5x7, so it's been pretty quick work....almost done!