In pastels and watercolours! What a lucky girl! It’s lovely being a pet portrait artist. There is so much cruelty in the world towards animals. You see it all over your newsfeed on Facebook, read about it in the papers. It’s everywhere. It makes me sad everytime. I just don’t understand it. So to me doing pet portraits let’s me see the happy side to pet ownership, the love people do show towards their animals. To me you can’t put a price on that.
Indy must be a very loved girl to herself painted twice. Once in the watercolours and once in pastels. My client is going for two portraits the same size and has chosen matching frames. Each painting will show Indy in a different pose and very different style.
I made a start on the watercolour portrait tonight. Annoyingly I forget to take a photo of the outline sketch, but I think I am happy with the layout of the watercolours. As I discussed in my post, The good, the bad and the ugly, most of the time you can’t tell how the painting will turn out until the pen outline has been added. The same will be with this. I feel good about it though.
Here is a photo of the watercolour laid down. Tomorrow I shall add the pen and maybe even some white acrylic. Sometimes I add it to pick out details certain details in the pet portrait.
So I got up really eager to add the black to Indy’s portrait and it was so worth the excitement. There is nothing more satisfying than having a portrait come together as you expected, or, in fact, even better than you had imagined. Well I think she has turned out better than I ever could have imagined. I am really delighted with her! I haven’t had a chance to scan yet, but tomorrow hopefully I will. She will be framed in a lovely white frame soon. Can’t wait to see her framed.
Tomorrow I will be sketching out her pastel portrait. I’d like to get that finished by the middle of next week so I can get them sent off. I have also managed some more on Leo, Tottie and Rosie’s portrait today.
Here is a phone photo of Indy, better scan to follow.
I dragged myself up to the loft to scan. OK I know that sounds really lazy, but it is more due to the fact my desktop is like a dinosaur and it takes an age to do. I tend to like to make a session of it as scanning one painting doesn’t seem worth it. I can go and put a load off washing away while they scan haha. So I took Finn, the working cockers portrait up to be scanned as well.
As you can see there is a huge difference and the vibrancy can really be seen once scanned.
I have made a start on the pastel portrait of Indy yesterday and I plan to have her finished tomorrow and then it will be a case of scanning it in and sending them over to my client. I have a selection of photos of which I am working from, but the main reference is Indy in a bandana. It has a tricky pattern to recreate, but to me that equals lots of fun! You know how I like to get my teeth into detail. Tomorrow I shall post some update on the progress of Indy’s portrait then.
Bit of a late blog post from me tonight. I don’t have access to all the photos so I will have to add them in tomorrow.
I have scanned in the pastel portrait of Indy and got the go ahead from my client to frame them which I did today. My client chose a lovely moulding for both portraits.
You can see below how well it works with both paintings of Indy.
