Nido

Meet Nido, a dog portrait of a lovely little Cockapoo, painted in soft pastels as a commission for a wedding present.

Cockapoo portrait in pastsl
Nido

This dog portrait is painted using soft pastels and is a bespoke 12″ x 9″ size prior to framing. The finished artwork was professionally framed complete with with artist glass (enhances the colours).

I have made a short slideshow for anyone curious in how this picture developed over time from start to finish.

Nido form start to finish.

In my earlier years doing dog portraits, I always started with the eyes first and worked around the picture from there. This invariably caused huge problems with eye position and scale, resulting in massive amounts of reworking. Nowadays, thanks to workshop tuition from Margaret Evans, I work on the portrait as a whole, and this is now the standard process that I use for both people and animal portraits.

Oorlich coo

Highland Cow in pastels
Oorlich coo

This coo was pretty damp but I’m pretty sure he was warm under that fur. Painted using soft pastels on Colourfix paper and based on a photo my daughter took while we were on a wee road trip around the Highlands.

A larger picture than normal at 20 x 16 inches prior to framing, so for the background I used dark browns with water to apply a loose wash, overlayed with some light blue.

I’m still deciding whether to cut down to 16 x 16 inches so will test out digitally.

Tarley

Border Collie drawn in charcoal 16" x 12" on white cartridge paper.

Meet Tarley, a Border Collie cross. This recently completed commission in charcoal (and a little bit of pastel) is 16″ x 12″ prior to framing and drawn on white cartridge paper. A friend of Archie (my previous post), Tarley is a cross with a Golden Retriever and quite the handful. After a lot of toy throwing in the garden we eventually managed to get a good picture to work from.