Through a series of random events (of course), I ended up being commissioned to paint Lisa’s (from Manzoni) dog for her husband’s birthday.
First, here is the dog, Anoosh (Armenian for sweetness):
I will say one thing – up front I should have asked for more photos of Anoosh. I didn’t realize how hard it would be to paint from a black and white photo (the painting was to be B&W also, so it seemed okay at the time)
There will be a ton of photos in here so you can see how the drawing / painting changed form over time. It was about a month’s time, with me painting at least an hour a day, most days.
Here is the first drawing pass. I ‘washed’ the canvas with watered-down yellow ochre to take back the whiteness a bit.
I started to add the background just to see how it was going to look:
Looking at them side-by-side was really helpful for getting the parts in the right places
I got feedback on my drawing from friend Bob and from people at the Carmel Foundation Art Lab – both said it looked ready to be painted!
I thought the left eye looked too far from the right eye so I moved it over a little bit. In hindsight I think I should’ve left it where it was, but I was scared to keep messing with it so it stayed where it is now.
This is one reason why it was hard to paint from a B&W photo. I couldn’t really tell depth and so the face looked really flat to me.
Starting to add more shading now:
I wanted to see how the gold metallic paint looked – very shiny (though maybe you can’t tell in the photo)
Starting to fill in the background now – noticed the ears looked too pointy so taking them back a notch
I showed a photo of the painting to Lisa to make sure she was good with the size of Anoosh’s ears. She loved them!
Up to now I was just going to fade out the body but one of the people at the CF Art Lab who taught HS Art for 30+ years said I should finish out the body. So, I started doing that. I didn’t have any photos of that part of Anoosh’s body but I found plenty of chihauhua photos online that I could reference
These next few are mainly finessing things, fixing shading and leg position
Final finished project – varnished with Gloss Mod Podge! They loved it!
And here is Anoosh with her painting:
Hope you enjoyed walking thru my process with me! ‘Til next time dear readers!