I loved working on this picture. A lot of challenges for me.
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Beautiful!
I especially love how nicely you blurred out the background and the darkness and contrast on the dog on the right.
wow
Thank you Jason. This means a lot.
Nice job overall but I am really fascinated with the detail here. Was all of this done with soft pastel sticks or was a pencil also used? Love the little hints of color in the pups . Can you speak a little about the process/?
A pleasure to look at and a learning opportunity for me .
thanks for posting. tom
Thank you Tom,
I will love to share what I did, but keep in mind I am learning too, so if someone sees I am doing something wrong, or they have a better way, then we can both learn.
I used mostly pencils for the dogs. I have tried underpainting with both sticks and pans, but to me if the area of color is not great, I just use the pencils.
I started with the dogs heads, first the lighter one and then onto the darker one. Once that was done, I went back and completed the body of the light one and then over to the dark one. I pick the colors I want to use for each dog and just start laying color, making sure my lines go in direction of the fur. If I have a big patch of light, I will put the light in first and work the dark around. But generally, I just work as I go. The pastels are pretty forgiving, so I can go in and change areas if I stray off course. Love how you can work both light to dark and dark to light!
Since this background had a lot of white and light yellow, I was worried about the dust from the dogs, so I did it last. Background is mostly done with Rembrandt soft pastels, because I love them. I have to put about 3 layers on and work into paper with my fingers, but they give me such a smooth look and I like that. I did use several pencils for the grass along with the edges of the sticks.
So that’s pretty much what I do. I joined with Matt 4 years ago and since then, I have drawn so many pictures, I am running out of storage, lol.
Oh sharpening my pencils, bought all of the “favorite” pencil sharpeners that people recommended. I ended up using the knife and sandpaper for bigger areas. For real fine areas, my daughter bought me a package of 100 sharpeners, just the little plastic throw aways. So I can get 1 or 2 good sharpenings out of most of them before I toss. Since the container is around $9.00 it’s a great deal. Saves me from headaches, lol.
I used to breed and show frenchies, and this is a nice representative of the breed. Even the way the brindle is sitting is so typical. Love it.
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Thanks for the fast reply. Funny you mention the sharpeners, I had just asked Matt what he used to sharpen his prismcolor pencils on the current Live bee project. He uses the little plastic ones
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