Cody

Cody
16" x 20", acrylic on canvas
sold

From a small cell phone shot. I did a preliminary study of this in a square format which I liked, but decided to use a landscape orientation canvas and include more body to offset the subject from being dead centered on the canvas. Although that would have been appropriate for a portrait.

 I had to ditch the Prussian Blue and Yellow Iron Oxide used at the start as they were just too saturated. The dog was beginning to glow in the dark. I switched over to the earth tones- Raw and Burnt Sienna, Ultramarine Blue and Naples Yellow. The background in the reference photo was an unusable interior scene.
Hitting a point of feeling "stuck", and with the panic deadline setting in, I tried something new- I submitted the painting on the dailypaintworks.com critique challenge, hoping for someone else's opinion besides my own. I received extremely helpful feedback, which helped me make some better decisions, and challenged me to come up with an unexpected background!

I learned a lot from working on this one.

Ebony

Ebony
acrylic on board, 12" x 12"
Sold.

   This is Nancy's dog, Ebony; a Cavalier King Charles spaniel. I think. I've never actually met her.
 I meant Ebony, not Nancy.

I'm still sticking with a limited palette strategy: this was done using four colors, plus black and white.

The wood panel was toned with a wash of Raw Sienna. After roughing in the dogs form with pencil, I built the value masses.
 The darker areas are mixes of Raw Umber & Ultramarine Blue, later overlaid with Mars Black.
 The lighter areas are Raw Sienna with a touch of Ultramarine Blue & Titanium White.
 Burnt Sienna was added to create the more intense warm browns on the legs.

 I added mixes of Ultramarine Blue to the washed background. There is a wee bit of Dioxazine Purple mixed into the cast shadow. I'm now wondering if I should have worked a little purple somewhere into the background to create more unity. But it's also fine as it is.

Chanel

Chanel
Acrylic on canvas. 12" x 14".

 An attempt at painting a Shih Tzu. This is my niece's dog, cooling off on a tile floor in Rio.

I limited the colors to the three primaries- Cadmium Yellow Light, Cad Red Medium and Ultramarine Blue. The floor was laid in as a mixed orange, then scumbled over with a blue and white mix, toned down with orange added. I washed over the tiles in the back with a thin layer of raw sienna to drop the intensity and push them back more. I had hoped for more orange tones to bleed through, but didn't pull it off.
With more time, I would have worked the tiles more, soften some of the edges and beef up the different fur directions. But in general it came out okay. I was told it looked like her.

Tessie and Kloey

Tessie and Kloey
Acrylic on canvas. 16" x 20".
(sold)

It's been a while since I've produced a painting... life got in the way again this past year, and then I had "painter's block" on top of that.
I recently agreed to do a painting of two small poodles, working from a photo taken with a cell phone several years back. (Here I will whine a little: cell phone shot = less than stellar focus and color balance). Tessie is the chocolate poodle with a more reserved personality; Kloey is the more outgoing apricot poodle.

  I began as usual by trying to recreate the photo and pretty quickly abandoned that idea as many of the elements were not reading well as a composition. It's odd how elements can look reasonable in a photo, but look very strange in a painting.
Working with the strong tile grout lines dominating the image was more challenging than I expected as they continuously lead the eye away from the subject and off the edge of the picture. Trying to set them in correctly using a ruler to measure the perspective angles resulted in an odd perspective- it worked much better to just use my eye to determine the placement of the lines.
 At one point I had included the kitchen cabinets lining the background, but they added nothing to the picture other than visual clutter. The vertical cabinets also pulled my eye off the top of the picture and away from the subject. After changing the angles and heights numerous times, I gave up and got rid of  the cabinets, leaving an expanse of tile floor which became disturbing (look at the image with the solid blue rug covered up- yikes!) Including and re-positioning the blue rug stopped the grout lines from shooting off into infinity.
  The tile floor was virtually the same color as the lighter dog.  Adding an overlay wash mix of white, raw sienna and cadmium red, and a touch of ultramarine blue over the light tiles to darken them and push them back helped define the lighter dog.

I'm pleased with the textural contrast of the hard floor behind soft throw rugs and soft dogs. I also like the warm/cool tones repeating throughout the painting. Incorporating the blue colors of the rugs into the dogs helped pull the image together although I am still not satisfied with how I handled the dogs fur textures, and need to find a better solution. The dogs look a little stiff to me, and I did not work out how to make them look more fluid. In retrospect, I should have adjusted more areas of their contours to blend in more with the background values of light and dark to avoid the "cut out" effect.

Ruby

Ruby

Acrylic on Masonite. 12" x 12".
(sold)

This is Ruby, an older lab with a lot of character and personality. When I started this painting of Ruby, she was in a decline from age related health conditions, and sadly she was gone before I finished her picture. She was loved and will be missed. I hope I did her justice.
She was blind in one eye, which had a different color and reflection. I wanted to include this without it being a major distraction.

I had a very difficult time with the grass and its blooms- everything I tried looked too stiff, too artificial, too stylized, and too contrived. I must have scrubbed off and and wiped out the background at least ten times, starting over by building layers on a new base of Gesso. One thing I am noticing is that when I apply the loose initial layers and textures, it all looks promising. As soon as I start fussing by adding calculated detail, I kill the spontaneity.

The initial mistake was that I was perceiving the grass blooms in the reference photo as being white. I finally went out and collected some grass plumes, and when placed against a white background, they showed as a multitude of  subtle neutral colors.
I  also had better results when I stopped using controlled brush strokes and tried pressing and dabbing the paint on with small variations in the direction.
Using old brushes that were a little stiff with broken and splayed bristles, held at different angles and dabbing gave the good results. I had been reluctant to toss out my collection of old worn out brushes, and now I'm glad I kept them.

 Randomly looking at how other people handled grass has revealed that everyone else has the same problem- it is very difficult to pull off.
I like Andrew Wyeth's technique of  dry brushed tempera layers to delineate grass with textures emulating the look of drypoint or etching on a copper plate.

I am increasingly aware of the lack of linear and textural elements in my work. That would be a good direction to explore.

Emma Dog

Emma dog
Acrylic on Masonite. 12" x 12".
(sold)

Its been a busy couple months with paperwork and obligatory tasks that left little time or energy to work on any paintings. I have a couple in progress but not resolved yet.
I started this painting about four years ago, set it aside, and never got back to it until this month when it surfaced again. Emma is a very elegant King Charles Caviler Spaniel who joined her owner and myself one summer day on a picnic in a park. I liked the contrast of the green background with the warm red and blonde tones in her coat. A lot of subtle color reflections were bouncing off the white areas of her coat as well. She sat quietly and observed all the activity going on around her with keen interest. This dog is prettier than most people I know.

I had the usual problems trying to photograph this with reflections bouncing off the layer of sap green. That particular green is very reflective after it dries.

Barnie

Barnie on a dirt road.
Acrylic on canvas. 12" x 16".

I was asked if I did paintings of dogs, and having never tried, I didn't know the answer. So I gave it a try.
Barnie appears to be a poodle.

The photo I worked from had good contrast but limited in detail and color. Except for the tongue.
I really liked that tongue.
Initially the tongue was a very intense pink and dominating the painting, but I was advised to tone it down so I worked a thin layer of black over the pink to drop the intensity, which worked out well.
(There was also a thin string of drool hanging from the mouth, but I decided it would be best remove that.)

At one point the dog's color morphed into a rich chocolate tone, but that wasn't accurate for the dog's actual coloring, and I worked over the surface to lean it back towards black.

The colors used were burnt sienna and burnt umber, a red oxide, yellow iron oxide, cerulean blue, and for the first time, black. I've had the the tubes of oxides around for a long time, but rarely used them. They behave a little differently from other colors in the intensity and opacity.


I'm pleased with the texture in this painting, and discovered possibilities for using black paint. I have always avoided black because I found it to be too "flat". Layering a black wash over other colors can yield some interesting and effective results.