Friday, May 13, 2016

Zoe

Most of you know that I 'retired' from painting pet portraits a few years ago but a friend asked me to paint a portrait of their dog, Zoe, and I couldn't refuse.

I've only met Zoe once quite a while ago so had to paint from photos.  My friend gave me quite a few of them but almost all of them 'blew out' the lighter colors so that they appeared white.  I didn't realize that Zoe has some tannish color until my friend pointed it out.  I still didn't see it even after tweaking the photos in my graphics software.  She sent me new photos, very close up and I think I was able to add those markings.

It's very difficult to work from photos so I'm waiting to hear back as to whether I got the markings right or not.  In the meantime, here is where I am with the portrait of Zoe.  This is probably the final with maybe a few tweaks.  It's gouache and watercolor on Arches Cold Pressed, 11 x 14 inches in size.

ZOE - watercolor and gouache on paper, 11x14"



1 comment:

Sue Clinker said...

Don't you just hate working from photos like that ... I haven't seen the refs, of course, but think Zoe is just beautiful and I hope you aren't asked to do any further tweaking.

Its amazing how very different images look when viewed on different computers/monitors also ... Whilst in the Canaries/Spain recently I compared a couple of my photos on a tablet, laptop computer and a friend's computer and was amazed to see how the colours/tones varied.