Sunday, December 4, 2011

Merry Christmas from the fluffiest of folk

i.e. Sparkle and Rosie the Shih Tzus. 

My grandma requested me to make her a Christmas card featuring her dogs. I thought it would be nice to brush up on my acrylic painting skills, so I did this painting Friday and Saturday (though I started the sketch right after Thanksgiving, eep.)


A few process photos after the break -- it actually went together so fast that I didn't really have time to take a ton of photos. 

As far as the dogs went, these are the two photos I painted from.


Rosie is easy to take a picture of (as she's usually positioned on top of a cushion somewhere), but usually pretty sleepy-looking these days. Sparkle is forever in motion . . . I took a few photos with me and/or Grandma holding her as well, but she looked sort of anxious and chastised, so I decided to paint from a slightly blurry by happy photo instead.


In process photos . . . as aforementioned, I worked quickly enough that I forgot to take too many of these. 


The nice thing about acrylic that I had forgotten was that you can work in little pieces and finish a bit at a time, instead of having to think about the whole painting at every single step.


The other thing I had forgotten about acrylic was that while it's pretty hard to just lay a wash over the painting to indicate reflected light, blending is awfully fun and doesn't require near the attention to the wetness of the paint that watercolor does.


I was pretty proud of the texture of my little knitted snowflake afghan over the arm of the couch there.

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