Portrait of a Dog

Portraits have never been my forte so I keep practicing, this time with a dog. I worked from a photo of this Labrador German shepard, which is my daughter's boyfriend's dog. I don't know the dog personally, so I wish I had a better picture, or at least a couple of different reference photos to better determine his coloring. Being a mostly black dog makes it challenging. The highlights in the photo come off as white and every shade in between, similar to my experience with my drawing of Darth Vader. This time, though, I was working with watercolor and fur.  I think I did a good representation of the dog that is in my reference photo, but I'm not sure if the reference photo accurately represented who the dog is.

Duck face pencil sketch

Of all the trends in 2015, I thought this one was quite silly. So let's commemorate duck face with a drawing!

The biggest challenge I had was with the hair, definitly an area I could work on. I kind of cheated on my last portrait, I've got a secret, by enlarging the face to the point where there was very little hair to deal with.  The eyes were my favorite.  Finding reference images for this was fun and quite hilarious!

I've got a secret...pencil sketch

This is a potrait piece of actress Katie Findlay. To give proper credit, it was taken from a freeze frame of the movie "The Bridge". I titled my drawing "I've got a secret" because of the smile and averted eyes. It has been a while since I have done a portrait, but I felt inspired. I used only a #2 pencil, my go-to medium when sketching...and a nice big pink erasure. :)

Portrait practice, sketch and watercolor

It has been more than 6 months since I have painting from a live model so I'm a little out of practice. I headed over to Patris' Studio since it was the second Saturday of the month which is when they usually have a clothed model doing a long sitting. When I got there, they told me they have not done the model on second Saturday since the beginning of the year, but they just happened to have a model doing a long sitting for another artist that was there that day. Just my luck that I showed on the right day of tje right month.
I decided to start with a quick pencil sketch, just to get some practice with proportions. I think I was off a little bit. The other artist that was there used the word "unresolved". The sketch is still unresolved!

I decided to move on to watercolor. With an overhead spotlight, her eyes fell into dark shadow, which gave her an odd look, but overall I think it turned out well. Her eye on the right though is still... unresolved!

Abandoned art, watercolor squares

I started this project a while back with some Earth Day art, and it was supposed to be an "abandoned art" project where these pieces were left in public places for people to find. Somehow, it never came to fruition. The part that was missing seemed to be the most critical part of the project, a scannable code or URL on the back of the artwork to direct whoever found the piece back to a website to get information about the artist.
So here are the pieces that I had created to be abandoned. I'm kind of attached to them now and I don't think they deserve to be abandoned any more. All of these are done on 4x4" squares of watercolor paper. Great for Christmas gifts or maybe I should mount them into a grid in a collage frame to display them as one piece.

Just some thoughts about the art...
For some reason I was stuck on creating negative spaces...for the lettering, the flowers, the eye.
I love the eye, but realize the challenge in portraits is not in creating one eye, but in creating a second mirror image that matches! The "imagine" piece is a bit chaotic, but I suppose the universe as well as my imagination might seem like that.

Should I make one more to finish the 3 by 3 grid? What word would you use?

Experimenting with watercolors

I taught a class about water coloring to my Artist Way group, focusing on different effects that can be created with watercolor. We started by talking about the different consistencies of the paint, depending on the water-paint ratio: tea, milk, or cream.  Start with tea, and work your way up to cream.  We discussed the nature of water always going to where it is dry...going from wet brush to dry paper, or wet paper to dry brush. I showed how to do washes and wet on wet blending of color, as well as resist with crayon, blotting, and even trying a salt effect. Sometimes I think I know just enough to be dangerous! It was just a fun night of playing with watercolor. Here are a couple of pieces I created...there was no plan, both of these just developed into something from trial and error.