Goodbye old, hello new!

"Near this spot are deposited the remains of one who possessed

Beauty without Vanity, Strength without Insolence,

Courage without Ferocity, and all the Virtues of Man, 

Without his vices.

This praise, which would be unmeaning flattery if

inscribed over human ashes, is buta just tribute to the memory of Boatswain, a dog."

Although I never met Pixi, I think her name could easily be exchanged for Boatswain's in this quote. Rescued from a puppy mill, she had been abused, but courageously, she kept on loving. Her legs were deformed, but that didn't stop her from being beautiful. She was special...even though she didn't even live to two years old.

This painting is finally finished, delivered and payed for. To be honest, I'm really glad that it's done, and especially glad that my client is happy with it. This didn't turn out to be exactly the best painting I've ever done. I'm trying  to tell myself; "Practice makes perfect -- the next one will be better" but it is rather frustrating to work on a painting that you just can't seem to "fix." I think part of the reason I didn't do so great on this one was that I took too long. I don't seem to have the "stamina" to stay excited and motivated about a piece for much more than a week, so when I drag the work out and put things off, I get bored and then I can't concentrate. :P For instance, I did this painting

 in just two days last week and I LOVE the result! I think another thing that helped make this one such a success was that it was not commissioned, so I had absolutely no pressure. I was able to keep it light and fun the whole way through, and try new things that might not work out without worrying about messing it up. :-) (this one is for sale btw...email me if interested) So anyway, GOODBYE old commission! In spite of my frustration, you helped me grow, and I did have fun working on you after all. More than that, I was so happy to be able to make a lasting memory of sweet Pixi. 

...And HELLO new commission! I can't post much about this one now because it's a gift, but I will say that I'm very excited about it; it's a commission in my favorite medium and of one of my favorite breeds of dog :-)

That's all for now....

New Commission!

Introducing my latest commission and the beginning stages of the painting:

There is a rather sad story behind this picture. The dog, who was rescued from a puppy mill passed away at the end of January. She wasn't even two. This 16x20 acrylic painting is for the girl's sweet 16th B'day.

 First stage: blocked in the background with very watered down paint, and took out the clouds with a tissue. The client wanted an angel in the sky, like it was waiting for the dog. Here is a close up of the dog:

 And here is a close up of the angel (which is currently nothing more than a pencil sketch) :

 And here is the beginning stages of the girl. Mostly just basic colors placed...will get to details soon...

So that's what I've been up to!

A walk in the woods

I'm loving this spring weather. Yesterday was GORGEOUS and my sister suggested a hike, which sounded wonderful! It's funny how the dogs can always tell when we are going somewhere instead of just going outside for a potty break. As soon as I let them outside they were doing the "happy dance" around and around the truck. We headed out for a nearby waterfall on the AT.

Abbi always has a crazy amount of energy, so I figured I'd make her get the most out of this hike that I possibly could by bringing her backpack. I didn't know what the temp would be like, so I brought a light jacket, thinking that if I didn't want it I would just stick it in the backpack (in addition to the two water bottles I had loaded her down with) Sure we were going to a waterfall, but Jed is the one who usually gets in the water right? Abbi wouldn't get too wet...ha! Abbi was in the water every chance she got. Needless to say, although I didn't want to wear my jacket, neither did I want to put it in Abbi's pack! :P Abbi is a wonder to me - inspite of the soaking wet 5+ pound pack on her little 40 pound body, she did not slow down one bit - she was literally bouncing off the walls!!...only there were no walls...and then she got home and begged me to throw the ball!

I was proud of Jed too. He can be really bad around other dogs sometimes and we have been working on that a lot recently. I've been trying to teach him that when he sees another dog, he needs to look at me (not growl at the dog.) Well, we met several other dogs on the walk and he was not perfect by any means, but he did show some improvement. For instance, we passed a 10 week old puppy and he started growling. I walked by quickly and then stopped. He sat down and looked right into my face! Believe me, this would have been totally unheard of a few weeks ago. What really made my day was on the way back. Jed was off leash walking just ahead of me. I (stupidly) wasn't really looking ahead, but I noticed Jed suddenly turn around and start quickly toward me. I looked up and there was a man and his black lab, also off leash, coming toward us and only several yards away! I could shoot myself for allowing this potentially VERY dangerous situation by having Jed off leash without watching, but I can't even tell you how proud I was of Jed for coming back to me on his own instead of charging the other dog!!

Nope. My dog are not always perfectly behaved. Yes, they are nearly pulling me off my feed in excitement. :P

Abbi and I at the waterfall. I love the way she poses for pictures! I took her pack off when we got to the waterfall so she could take a rest (as if she needed one!) and swim without me worrying about her.

"Did you call me??!" Yes I did Mr. Jed! That's my boy!

I love this picture. He is just the most darling pup!

He was so determined to get that stick!! Haha!

I love Abbi's back. The bags detach from the super nice harness, which makes it MUCH easier to take them on and off. Also, it is SO tough! The way this dog tears and tumbles through the woods, I don't know how it has managed to last as long as it has, but it is still as good as new!

Mr. Kitty

Last night I finished a drawing that I've been working on for a while now. On my facebook fan page Real Animal Pet Portraits I had a contest and this is the winner. Just thought it would be fun to show the drawing from start to finish.

 The first thing I do when I make a drawing is sketch it out. As you can see, I don't get too obsessed with precision or detail in this stage, because it just gets drawn over. I keep everything really light. I do try to get proportions and basic features placed correctly though. Basically, this stage is just so I have a rough map on which to place the detail. This drawing is 8x10 and done on Bristol board.

I usually start my drawing with the very darks and the main features of my subject. Starting with the darks probably isn't always the best of ideas, but that's just what I do. :) You can also see here that I've already changed the basic sketch - I moved the lower jaw in farther.

I had a lot of trouble deciding if I was going to do the eyes green or not, but after I decided to, I was very happy! The eyes are done in prismacolor colored pencil. Sure, they look "just" green, but there are probably between 5 and 10 different colors in each eye. In this stage also I did some shading around the hairs in the cat's ears and started to do some hair on the top of his head.

Not much to say here. The cat has whisker dots, a shadow behind his left ear and stripes. You can see that I'm still working mostly with the very darks. I guess the dark hair can be faster because you can't see as much detail as you can with light hair. The shadows between the hair are the same color as the hair itself, which really cuts down on the amount of work involved. Oh, I also started on the cat's ruff. Since the ruff is made of long, soft, somewhat frizzy hair I can't get too detailed on it. Here I've rubbed some shadows on with a tissue that has been rubbed in graphite. I guess I had a lot to say here after all!

Now I've started with the lighter hair on the forehead. This hair is incredibly time consuming because it consists of layers upon layers of tiny, individual pencil strokes. It can be hard sometimes to fill up a large space with hair without making the hair in "rows" or too straight and "flat" looking.

More hair. Started on giving part of the ruff a bit of detail.

More hair, and more detail to the other side of the ruff. Also started adding the whiskers. I did this simply by "drawing" them in with my kneaded eraser. 

Here (in addition do doing more hair) I've done some more shading with a tissue in the ruff. I typically don't like to use a tissue to shade or smudge a drawing because that makes it loose detail, but for something like this fluffy ruff that needs to look extremely soft and fluffy, it works really well. I had to re-draw the whiskers after all that smudging.

And here is the finished product :) I gave the cat's right eye a pretty major overhaul. It was really bothering me that it didn't have a pupil, so I actually tried putting a pupil in. If you've ever worked with colored pencil, you know how scary this was because colored pencil DOES NOT erase. Well, as it turned out, after quite a long time (probably near an hour) of layering colors and toying with the shape, placement and size of it,the attempted pupil/slit looked horrible! I ended up scraping it off with the tip of a knife. But the eye still looked weird. After studying my reference photo, I finally realized that the shape was all wrong. It was too big and not slanted up enough. So I did another crazy thing. I took my knife again and started scraping off the inside edge of the eye. It's still not perfect, but I was able to get it down to a much better size and shape. Whew. I don't know that I've ever attempted to change something so major and basic this late in a drawing, but I was really happy with the way it worked out. Also in this last stage I finished the cat's left ear. Basically, I smudged up the inside of the ear with my tissue, and then "drew" the hairs in with my kneaded eraser. The hairs look a bit stiffer than I would like them too, but I guess they're fine. I did a lot of tiny adjustments in this stage too...there was a lot of sitting down, drawing a few hairs, and then standing back from the drawing to see if I missed anything. To finish the drawing, I drew in the whiskers coming off the left side of the drawing, and signed it. ALL DONE! :)

Here is the original photo and a few close-ups of the eyes and face: