Hi! I'm hoping to share more of my process in what I do, and a bit about me along the way. I hope some of these things are helpful to you if you're finding your way with art, or just interesting if you've happened upon my blog through this website.
Today I thought I'd share a few photos of a special commission I worked on last year. This one was for my own grandpa, to celebrate his 85th birthday! A family member tasked me with creating a portrait of his two crazy cocker spaniels, Poppy and Rosie.
Perhaps the most challenging part about this project was finding a reference photo to use - It's hard to get this pair sitting still at any one time.
I used this photo taken in 2018. It's cropped from the original, so the quality was a little lowered as I was drawing from it. I loved the expressions on their faces, as this really captures their personalities. Poppy is such a smiley dog, and Rosie can barely sit still. I think this picture sums up their personalities nicely!
I also liked the warm lighting in this photograph. It lights up Poppy's face quite dramatically. I wanted to make sure that Rosie didn't get lost in the portrait though, so I knew I'd have some work to do making sure that Poppy didn't become the only focus.
I worked on A3 paper for this portrait. At the time, I was quite new to the pastel scene and only used Stabilo Carbothello pastel pencils. I used Winsor and Newton Tints pastel paper for this one. This paper has an Ingres texture, which allows the pastel to sit down into the paper. This is before I'd ever met Pastelmat or velour (two very wonderful types of paper which I love to work on), and I don't think I'll work on Ingres paper again for pet portraits - the texture isn't too appealing to me. Of course it's down to personal preference, and if using bigger pastel sticks and a lot of layers, then this might work for you. I chose a muted grey colour to set off the warm tones in the dogs' coats. Back then I wasn't too comfortable doing backgrounds, so I left it plain. If I were to redo this portrait, I think I'd like to add some foliage into the background - not only because it would complete the picture a bit more, but because these two dogs spend most of their days roaming around my grandpa in the garden, so it would be fitting.
And so it begins! I'm left handed so I always start work on the right side of the picture. That way I'm less likely to smudge my work.
With a small range of colours I'm able to build up some of the textures and hair on Rosie. At first I was worried that the sunlit highlight on her tongue looked too bright, but just had to trust in what I saw in the reference photo. (I used a couple more brown pencils than are in the photo on the left.)
This one show how I tend to work quite well. I like to render the picture pretty much in full as I go along to avoid smudging. I do map out obvious curls and key areas as I go, as you can see in Rosie's chest hair here.
Getting all of these tones into Rosie's coat with the selection of pencils I had was challenging. It involved a lot of layering to create the smooth blends of hair as it caught the light and shadow. I needed to really get into all of those Ingres dips in the paper so that they didn't show through. It was hard going.
Starting to take shape now! Having got those lighter values in on Poppy, I had a lot more confidence in the way I had used colour on Rosie.
I remember finding Poppy's mouth particularly challenging, trying to get all those teeth in.
And here they are!
It was well received too!
I hope you enjoyed seeing how these two came together. I had only been using pastel pencils seriously for a few months at this point, and if I were to revisit this again I think I would do a lot of things differently, particularly in creating the texture of the hair and in my use of white. I think it's a good piece to learn a lot from - I certainly learnt a lot from this one.
If there's anything you'd like me to cover in my blog, questions or things you'd especially like to see, drop me a line.
Until next time! - T x
