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

Spokes

This one was another Christmas present and I just barely finished it in time! I was drawing like crazy, not just on this one but also Carol and Bernie, and Oreo. These portraits make great Christmas presents, but I have to be careful not to overload myself next year. I just barely managed to finish everything in time for Christmas.

So anyway, this is Spokes. Spokes is yet another dog waiting by Rainbow Bridge for the rest of his family to join him and Jennifer and the rest of their family miss him very much. Jennifer asked me to draw his ball too, because that's how much he loved it. In the picture she sent me, he's standing in the snow with his ball in front of him as if to say 'One more throw Mom, it's not that cold!' And despite how drawing spheres is a beginner's first lesson, I've actually never drawn one before! It was kinda interesting :) Spokes himself was easy. Being black, I didn't have to worry so much about texture. I made his edges furry to suggest the texture, but as for the rest, it was just black. The problem I had though was I had to use white as a border between dark places, like his head and back, and his face and chest. I think it turned out ok, but the light places are all weird. The light source was the top right, so the top of his head and back were supposed to be lighter and the shadow goes on the bottom left. But then under his chin is light too because I had to differentiate between his face/chin and his body! I didn't like his paws either, they didn't seem grounded and I realized why after I took this picture - his legs have shadows but his paws don't! So I put some shadows in around his feet and it looked much better after that. Unfortunately, I mailed it off before I could take a picture of the changes, so this is the only picture I have. But it doesn't look too bad:)

Spokes in graphite

Oreo

My latest picture is a cat named Oreo. I'm not sure if there's a Rainbow Bridge for cats, but if there was he'd be there. Probably sunbathing in a tree where the dogs can't bother him :) You can't tell from the drawing, but Oreo only had 3 legs. A lady named Marty asked me to draw her Oreo as a Christmas present for her husband. They both loved him very much :)

Oreo was the first cat I've drawn and I was a little nervous about it, but figured it couldn't be much different than drawing a dog or a horse. The only problem with Oreo is that he was black and white. Which isn't a problem for a cat, but makes drawing him difficult. It's hard to show the texture of the fur when the fur is really dark and it's near impossible to show any texture at all when what you're drawing is pure white. How do you depict texture without using color and turning it gray? Well, the answer I found is to leave the white white and use what's around the white to depict the texture. So the borders between the white and the black are fur-like and that suggests the rest has that texture as well. And where his white fur met the white backround, and for the shadows on his white fur, I had to make small, VERY light strokes to suggest fur. Being self-taught, I'm not sure this is the right way to go about drawing white fur, but I think it turned out nice :)

The other problem was the V on Oreo's back. I really hate drawing long fur/hair, it's a big pain in the butt. But that's probably just because I don't have much experience or practice with it yet. I like to hope it'll get easier, lol. So first I mapped out the major white areas and the major black areas. Then I kinda made the borders less obvious by mapping out some black strands in the white fur and white strands in the black fur. Once I had everything mapped out, I shaded it in and then blurred the borders even more by making strands in the white fur of different widths and various shades of gray. I also erased small hairs in the black fur, but mostly I just added black to the white. I mapped on the side of caution - it's easier to add black than to erase it! Also a side note, I used the same technique for the inside of his ears and I mapped out his white whiskers before I shaded so I could draw around them.

So all in all, I really like how this one turned out. It actually didn't take all that long for all that I was worrying about it. I would've liked to use some artistic license to take out the bump above his head and the bump behind his neck, but I drew it as I saw it *shrug*

Oreo, in graphite

A closeup of Oreo's face. The photos never seem to capture the little details that make the drawings so realistic (hey, I'm an artist, not a photographer!), so I decided to take a closeup picture