Dave Brown

 So this is Dave Brown. A very handsome looking doggie. I was asked to do this for a colleague's mother for her birthday, he took me about 15 hours and is created using Neocolor 2 wax crayons.

He is a lovely looking dog with a face full of personality, which I apparently captured perfectly. 

This is the reference photo:-

Monday Musings

 I often see pet artists tell people how to take a photo of your pet to get the best portrait.

This is easy if your beloved pet is still with you, but what if it isn't? No-one thinks when they take snaps of their furball that it might be used to create a loving memorial.

So what do you do when this happens, you ask for as many photos they can give you which gives you the essence of the animal, its spirit and that is what you try to capture. At the end of the day the colouring might not be quite right as the reference may have been faded or in a bad light, but the expression is there, the droopy eyes, the nicked ear from a fight with the neighbours cat, the lopsided toothy, (or toothless) grin, you get the idea.

You get that right and the rest falls into place.

I'm working on a couple at the moment and yea they are harder than if you have a 'good' reference, but I hope I've caught their spirit and done them justice.

I can't share them yet obviously but fingers crossed.

A new beginning

So I've been an artist for a long time, but have only just got my rear into gear to create a blog.  

Here I am looking out of the window on a particularly wet day, supposed to be working on a doggie commission but instead I am working on my blog.

Seems like a good idea, sort of.

So as my bio says I have been an artist for a loooooong time. Although there have been considerable breaks in my work, due to kids, poorly parents, work commitments - you name it, if I can come up with an excuse I will.  Seriously though I've been creative all my life, when the kids were little and I didn't have much alone time I would write, I still do. There are at least five drafts of novels that really need to see the light of day.

But this latest venture, back into creating portraits started purely by accident.  A colleague at work had recently lost their beloved dog, and on a whim I offered to do her a portrait, get me back into it.

 

At this point I made a decision, I would attempt to do one drawing a month to build up a decent portfolio and possibly look at other options such as prints etc and if I was still enjoying it as the year went on I would seriously push the portraits and maybe do it full-time.

Little did I realise just what this would lead to. The boss was retiring and as a leaving gift it was suggested that I do a portrait of his labradoddle 'Hugo' I thought why not.

Then someone else wanted their children doing, someone else their parents, another their dogs and so on.

So I started charging, not a lot as they were helping me build up my portfolio. So here we are in August and so far I have completed twice what I set out to do and have made a little on the way. The list of commissions is growing from other sources now, so we will see what happens. All in all though a very positive start.