One dog, two portraits!

This Chinese New Year, I had the opportunity to visit my cousin and there, I met her lovely dog, Lincoln. Long story short, I offered to paint him, and ended up with not one but two drawings! 

Here's the story of how I ended up drawing Lincoln twice. I was given a selection of photos to choose from, and even though I prefered this shot, I was not confident of getting the teeth and mouth area right with pastels.

So I decided to go with this photo instead. It was a head shot which I'm generally more comfortable with.

I used Canson Mi-Teintes Touch paper in a light yellow. As always, I started with the background and almost immediately, problems arose. I had decided to do a simple ombre background in purple but the markings didn't turn out to my liking. The paper was already quite saturated and the effect looked messy to me.

So I decided to do a semi-bokeh background instead, by drawing some light spots. I also smoothened out the rest of the background on the right. Much better.

I had intended to use pastel pencils to draw Lincoln, so I could get the finer details but for some reason, they didn't work well on top of the PanPastels underpainting. Canson Mi-Teintes Touch definitely takes fewer layers than some other types of sanded paper. So I had to use pastel sticks instead, which made the details rather challenging.  

I painted everything on the left side first, including the cushion and the left part of Lincoln's face. Daughter said he looks like the Phantom of the Opera 😆

Then it was filling in the rest of the dog, and here's the final painting.

I think it looks ok but I wasn't really feeling the fur. White furry animals are tough to draw. It's quite challenging to be able to show definition and fur direction while keeping the "whiteness" of the dog. 

My mind kept going back to the other photo which I loved, and that's how I came to the decision to attempt another drawing. This time, I used pastel pencils on unsanded paper - Clairefontaine Paint On grey paper.

I kept things simple - no background. For the blur, out of focus effect on the fur, I used a pastel shaper with a sponge tip.

And then I got to work on the eye. The eyes are key to bringing animals to life, they will make or break the painting.

And almost equally important, the nose.

Forgot to take more progress pics - the mouth area took me a while, that was the most challenging bit. And here's the final pic! To be honest, I love this one a lot more. I think he looks so endearing in this pose.

Two paintings of a lovely creature, who incidentally loves my son.

Sweetness ♥