So I am starting my next pastel pet portrait while I am making the finishing touches to Cruz’s portrait. This is a double dog portrait and it is going to be gift to my clients husband. It is of a wheaton terrier and golden retriever.
It always feels weird going from something really quite large to something much smaller. It may not sound like a huge difference going from something sized 16×16 inches to 12×8 inches, but it is quite a jump when you work in such detail!
The reference photos I was given to work from shows the two dogs in the boot of the car. For the pet portrait I will be moving them slightly closer together. The boot of the car won’t be featuring in the portrait and I will be replacing the background with a plain shade that matches their colouring. Also my client has asked me to paint the wheaton terrier with trimmed fur as opposed to longer fur in the reference photo. She sent me another to help with this. I can normally make adjustments like this to pet portraits, please feel free to ask when making your enquiry.
Here you can see the reference photograph for the pet portrait
For the portrait of these two gorgeous dogs I have cropped in closer to their head and shoulders as it is 12×8 inches portrait and we wanted their gorgeous faces to be the focus. Here you can see how I have cropped in from the outline drawing below.
Below you can see the start I have made on the gorgeous golden retriever in this dog portrait. Really a beautiful deep golden coat. As you probably know some are darker than others, some being almost white and others almost classed as red. Such beautiful dogs.
As I mention the little wheaton terrier needs a trim for his portrait and I am using another photograph to help me with that. I think you maybe able to tell from this next photo of the pet portrait that his fur is shorter!
I have made good progress on the double dog portrait today. I am very nearly ready to add the background in and then put on the finishing details, ready for the final scan. I definitely think the wheaton terrier needs a little work, so I may google some reference images to help me there, but as always I shall send it to my client first for any comments and amendments.
I hate my Samsung phone for photographing my artwork, it makes it far too ‘sharp’ unnaturally sharp. They really don’t need their camera to do this. It makes the photos of my portraits look not right, they are much softer in real life. Anyway at least I will have the final scan uploaded by the end of the weekend and you can see all my dog portraits as scanned images in my dog gallery.
At least the two photographs can give you an idea of the progress I have made today. Looking forward to adding the background tomorrow.
I nearly forgot to update this gorgeous duos pet portrait! THe background was added and I opted for a pale blue as it made sure the paler dog didn’t get lost in the background, and I didn’t want to go to dark as I think it being a smaller portrait it might be too much. After the background was added I finished all the details on the portraits and got it scanned in. My client is delighted so I am going to get framing tomorrow and arrange a time for delivery as they are based in Sevenoaks, Kent so we can drop off.
Here is the final scan of the dog portraits
I think you can see what a difference a scan makes to the final image I send to my clients!