This is the progress of Jake the very sweet Jack Russell who came round for a secret photoshoot. I love meeting the wee characters I paint 🙂
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| The finished painting, pastel on velour 10″x14″ |
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| This is one of the photos I took of Jake. A tip for photographing your dog for a head portrait. Put them up on a chair and use natural light from one side. This brings them up to your eye level and also prevents them from moving around quite so much. A well timed squeak can then sometimes get that wee face you want for the portrait! |
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| My line drawing transferred onto the velour and tweaked further with pastel pencil. |
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| The first layer on the background. |
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| I’m creating a very simple gradient with nice subtle blue shades. |
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| Planning on bringing Jake to Kilmood Art club to show my techniques to the members and demo my lovely Unison animal set. |
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| I got quite a bit done during the demo evening and at this stage I’ve tweaked a bit further and am adding smaller detail the next day. Sorry for the lack of progress shots between those stages…remembering to chat at the demo while painting is enough let alone taking progress pictures too 🙂 |
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| Blocking in the dark areas for the rest of the coat. Using a Faber Castell pastel on it’s side. The black is a really rich dark black and not quite as soft as the Unison. |
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| I also use a few pastel pencils to flick out the very smallest hairs. |
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| But the majority of detail is done with the bigger sticks as they wear down into sharp edged shards. |
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| The tiny crumbs are useful too! |
Hope you enjoyed Jake’s progress.
Beautiful Emma! I love pastel on velour for animals, makes that fur happen so nice. This is awesome! Thanks for sharing your process, too!
Thanks so much for visiting and commenting Pattie I really appreciate that. I love working on velour…slightly addicted 🙂