Sox #2 :)

This is the second drawing of Sox I've done, and I like this picture MUCH better. The portrait too, but even just the picture. I only drew that last picture because it was my Granny's favorite, but personally this is a much better picture, turned out better, and I just like it :) This is a front shot, where you can see her face and she's not staring at some random object not drawn. She's relaxed, her mouth is open and happy, and you can see her better. So I like this portrait better :)

 The photograph I took of this drawing has some graphite shine in the body, so it looks darker than this picture does. Because Sox was black, I had trouble getting the shadows in the face dark enough and I finally had to draw some of the hair in charcoal to get it dark enough. For some reason it doesn't look like Sox though. I think it's a good drawing, it just doesn't look like Sox and I can't figure out why. But it's still a good drawing and Granny will know who it is, so I'm pretty happy with it :)

My Briarlight :(

I've known for a while that my Briar has a problem with his rear left leg. Sometimes when he walks, he'll curl it up underneath him and only use 3 legs for a couple steps, and then he'll go back to using all 4. I took him to my vet a while back and I was told he has a subluxating patella. Meaning, the tendons in his knee are stretched and can't hold his kneecap in place well any more. Whenever his kneecap pops out of place, he'll keep it bent and use 3 legs and the vet showed me how to gently straighten out his leg to pop it back into place. The vet also told me he'll need surgery at some point and he referred me to a specialist.
The specialist agreed that he would need surgery at some point, but gave me anti-inflammatories to give him for the sprain. And he got better for a while. I knew it still hurt him, but he used it, and it was always in the back of my mind.
Well, then when I went to Kanab, UT for an internship at Best Friends Animal Sanctuary, he got sick. He was throwing up and having diarrhea. Three vet trips, a blood test, an x-ray, and $600 later, I was told he had a sensitive stomach and to change him food :P I was not happy. I mean, I was happy it was such an easy problem to fix and not something life-threatening, but all the time and money and worrying it took me to find out he has a sensitive stomach did not make me happy.
But that's over and done with. What I want to mention is the x-ray they took. He's such a small little guy that an x-ray of his stomach was pretty much a full-body x-ray, and I got a good glimpse at the bones in his bad knee. I knew he'd have arthritis, I didn't realize it had gotten so bad so quickly! The top of his femur is calloused and deformed due to arthritis :(
Then a few nights ago, he started whining and crying for no apparent reason, but he'd yelp any time we even went near his leg. I gave him the very last rimadyl, left over from his sprain, and put a hot pad on his knee and he quieted down. And I took him back to the specialist the next day.
Well, long story short, he's now scheduled for surgery next Monday :( Luckily, I have quite a few more 'likes' on Facebook, over 100 now! And I put out a plea to all of my fans, I need more commissions to raise money for my Briarlight's surgery! It's going to cost roughly $1200, and that's $1200 that I don't have :/
But I do have some things working for me. Number one, Christmas is coming up so hopefully I'll get a big Christmas rush and do a bunch of portraits. Also, this Saturday is another big craft fair at the Nevada Humane Society and of course, I signed up for a table. Briar's always with me when I do these and this time, I'm going to wrap his leg so people can see he's injured and have a 'Briar donation' jar. In between that and the portraits I'm hoping to accumulate at the fair, hopefully I'll have enough for his surgery. After that, I'll have to come up with this month's rent XP

Tinman and Bella :)

It took me a while to get to these portraits, but I finally got them both done. This is Bella on the right and Tinman on the left. They belong to the 'usual crowd' at my favorite dog park in Las Vegas. Of course, I'm in Reno now but I go to Vegas all the time to visit my family and I always take my Briar to this really nice dog park on Warm Springs. And there's a 'usual crowd' made up of a few people and their dogs. They come about the same time every morning and they all commandeer a picnic table and hang out together. And I join them when I can :) When I mentioned I draw pet portraits and showed them a few of my works, of course they wanted their own! (All of them dote on their dogs, it makes me so happy to see :) They said no hurry, so I put them on the back burner for a while. But now they're done!!

This is Tinman! I had a really hard time trying to get his muzzle right. The way his mouth looks in the picture, his lips kinda curl up into a smile, but when I tried to draw it like that, it just looked photoshopped and ridiculous. It took me a while to be satisfied with it, and I'm still not very happy. Also his eyes. His left eye bulges out just right (he is a Chihuahua after all), but his right eye looks kinda flat and the contrast makes the portrait look funny. Not my best work, but he's done :)

And this is Bella. She's a sweetheart Jack Russell Terrier who loves to cuddle and give kisses. I like her eyes, I worked really hard to make them realistic and I think I did a pretty good job. But I was not satisfied with her left ear. The shadow under her ear is so dark it pops out, it's like the focal point instead of her white fur, and I did everything I could to make it fade into the background instead.
I look at my past works and they're beautiful and then I look at my recent works and I'm not happy with them :/ I must be out of practice. I'll have to fix that!

Ashlee and Sox, RIP TT_TT

I have some very sad news, my granny's dog Sox had to be put down last week. Since I was already commissioned by a family friend Jan to draw Sox and her cat Ashlee, but hadn't started, I got started right away and gave the picture of Sox to my granny as a present from me and Jan both (although I didn't charge Jan for it, how could I have?) So I drew Ashlee and Sox.
Sox was a big sweetheart. And when I say big, I mean BIG. She was a black lab/great dane mix and she weighed more than I do. She was probably longer than I am tall too, lol. She was 12 or 13, which for a great dane mix, is pretty old. She did nothing but laze around, plop herself down in the middle of the action for the attention, and beg relentlessly at dinner time. And we loved her to death :) She also had a very intimidating bark and though my granny had been broken into twice, that never happened again after Sox came to live with her. She was a giant who would take up all of the couch but leave Granny a small corner to squeeze into, and her part of the couch was distinctly marked with a pound or two of black fur, which never seemed to go away no matter how much laundry and vacuuming we did. She was always excited to go to the park and get her dinner, to the point where even as arthritic as she was, she'd jump up and down ecstatically, but never once did she jump onto or hurt frail Granny. She was a big lovebug and she will be dearly missed. I drew Granny's favorite picture of her in remembrance.

Honestly, I'm not sure I like this one. I think I did a pretty good job, it looks just like her from the white on her muzzle to the spiky fur on the back of her legs. But her eyes look horrible, and in my opinion that's the most important part. If you can't capture the expression of their face, and dogs smile with their tail and in their eyes, it doesn't matter how good the rest of the picture is, the picture's lifeless. The eyes aren't just expressionless, they don't even look like eyes. They look like buttons that you would sew onto a doll in place of eyes. But I am, after all, my own worst critic and Granny loves it, so I'm happy :)
I hate Ashlee even more, for the same exact reason. Her eyes have life and expression to them, but they're misshapen and weird, and for that reason the entire picture sucks. I really need to keep working on this, I'm out of practice :(

Alice's daughter

This is my latest work in progress, as I currently have no commissions. Alice is a Facebook friend of mine in the UK and she's a photographer. I love her work, all of her pictures are so soft looking, and I wanted to see if I could imitate it. So I asked if I could steal one of her pictures, she said sure, and I chose this one. Which just so happened to be her daughter. Since this wasn't commission, just for my own experimentation, I did it in my sketch book instead of my nice commission paper. And I haven't quite finished yet, but I am SO happy with how it's turning out! The eyes especially! Eyes are really hard, they have so much texture and depth and expression it's really hard to capture in a drawing. But I worked on these eyes over and over and over, adding color and taking it off, forever. Until I finally got the texture I wanted. These are by far the best eyes I've ever drawn and that's the only reason why I'm blogging about an unfinished picture, I am just so proud of the work I did on these eyes! And I love how soft and perfect her baby hand and her tiny lips are. I think I captured the softness of the photograph pretty well too and the shading looks just perfect. But then she has longer hair too, so that's going to be a challenge when I get to it.What do you think? :D

A bit of history... :)

This was my very first drawing (thus the grid) and it has a bit of history attached. I've been drawing cartoons and manga since before I can remember, and when I tried drawing a picture of me and my siblings in 9th grade we all ended up looking like Bigfoot. So I decided to stick with manga ^^;

My very first dog changed all that. A few months after I adopted my beloved Briar (7 years later), I decided to try and draw him and this was the result. I decided it turned out pretty good, so I drew another one.

I was in college at UNR at the time, and brought my sketch book with me to draw in between classes. Well, a friend saw my second drawing and asked me to draw her horses. And then more friends asked me to draw their pets and before I knew it, I was in business! My beloved Briar changed my life and started my portrait business :)

My very first (real) drawing :) Briar in graphite

My second drawing, Briar in graphite with a carbon pencil to deepen the shadows. This is the drawing that started everything!

Carol and Bernie

I found out my stepmom had to put her schnauzer down in November, so I decided to draw a picture of him for her for Christmas. I asked my dad for a picture and this is the one he send. It was taken qiute literally before Bernie was put down. Bernie was wearing a doctor's wristband and you could see the vet office in the backround. I can only assume Carol is crying into poor Bernie's fur. But also Bernie knew there was something up. He was at the vet, Carol was crying, and Dad was shoving a camera in his poor little face and in the original picture, Bernie was licking his lips nervously (they do that sometimes, it's called a calming signal). Of course my dad having a sense of humor, that's why he chose this picture, but I had to edit out Bernie's tongue. I couldn't stand drawing it when I knew it was a signal to those around him that he was uncomfortable. (Also, I thought it ruined the picture).

So this was a tough one. I had to make up details in Bernie's muzzle because I could only see half of it, I had to edit out the wristband (which meant more making up details), Bernie had long fur which is a bitch to draw, and then Carol had long curly hair too! Also there's that big spot in between Bernie and Carol's shoulder where everything is so dark you can't tell which is which. Which I guess isn't too hard to draw, it's just a big black mass, but I don't like doing that because I like everything to be detailed. And Bernie's eyes and right ear are much darker than the rest of the picture, I don't like that either :/ But all in all, considering how difficult a portrait this was, I think it turned out great. Carol says every time she looks at it she starts crying (which was NOT my intention! :P ) but she likes it and I'm glad :)

Carol and Bernie in graphite