Phew this is going to be fun. I just love painting Border Collie portraits. Such lovely looking dogs, beautiful bright and alert eyes, so this is going to be really fun to do as I have 4 of the beauties to paint on this.
My client sent me a whole selection of photos to work from. She specifically wanted it to fit a frame she has at home so I had to have a bit of a juggle to get them all to work. I ended up with what a call the floating heads look as to put them all in a line would have put the dimensions out and it wouldn’t fit the frame.
I have been sketching out the portrait over the last couple of days and I am all ready to go. I might start bringing some of the details and firming up the sketch tonight, but framing and packing up Teddy’s portrait has worn me out! Yes it can be quite hard work and stressful that job!
Hopefully you can make out the sketch below. I will post another update soon.
Here you can see I did manage to sit down and do and hour after dinner. I have started building up from the feint outline sketch. I find I have to otherwise I can lose some of the details as it is so feint my hand can easily smudge or erase them! Tomorrow from here I can start blocking in the shadows and so on. I will also get the eyes done. The bottom one is mainly a white border collie and he has the beautiful ice blue eyes. Absolutely stunning they are. I love blue eyes. I believe the call them wall eyes, but I will have to check that!
I have made some progress on this lovely multiple dog portrait this evening. It’s proving to be great fun to do as I thought it would. Such handsome dogs. It’s taking quite a lot of concentration as each head is quite small. So I am having to take breaks quite regularly to let my eyes recover. A bit like Ozzy’s portrait! However I am pleased with the progress. I need to put in the background and that is going to be a pale blue.
These boys have been so much fun to paint I haven’t been able to put the portrait down. It has been quite intense work as each dog is quite small on the paper, but I love a challenge and who can resist these handsome faces and highly intelligent eyes! Not me.
I added the blue background next. Often I leave the background to last but as I knew what colour my client wanted I could crack on with it. Often it gets left due to my procrastination! I also think they matched the wall eyes of the bottom dog.
I did take some progress shots for my client but to be honest I am not going to share them as they really don’t do this lovely dog portrait justice. I am going to go straight to the finished item!
Meet the boys!
