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Portrait of Titch
This pet portrait of 'Titch the Springer Spaniel' is my latest commission and a piece of work I am very proud of.
So how do I get to the end result?
Here I will break down, with photos the process by which I painted Titch and hopefully give you a better understanding of how a pet portrait comes together.
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Stage one - The basic outline drawing.
Probably one of the most important stages is the outline on which to build your watercolour painting. It must be in proportion and placed correctly on your page and the best way of doing this is to make basic measurements. I do this with my pencil by measuring the width and depth of the dog’s head on the photo provided, which you can see in this image bellow.
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Lets say for arguments sake the dept takes up one third of my pencil, and I want to make this painting to fill an A3 sheet of paper in landscape position, I will offer up my pencil to my A3 page and determine how may times 1 third my pencil will fit on the page from top to bottom. Lets say one third of my pencil fits a little over 4 times on my sheet of paper.
At this point I need to decide how much space I want around the portrait. Lets say I choose 3" top and bottom. I'm left with a space 3 x the third of my pencil, in this case that's one whole pencil length and that's the size my dogs head is going to be on the page, I make light pencil marks to give me guidelines that can be rubbed out later when the painting is finished. I then repeat the same procedure to produce the width of the dog’s head.
I follow the same procedure throughout the basic line drawing always tripling the various small lengths using my pencil. I.e. say the distant between the eyes is about 1" of my pencil, I will triple that and make light marks on my paper where I think the eyes should be. Then I will measure distance from the nose to the eyes etc, until I have everything where it's supposed to be.
Now I used my marks and the photo to draw the basic outline read to paint and here is the result and I continue to make measurements as I draw.
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Stage two - Using blocking fluid and laying the base colours.
I you have not used blocking fluid before visit my basic tips ' blocking fluid' for more advice before using.
I apply your blocking fluid to the areas where I want to keep the white of the paper to show through later. The key here is to think about where I want the highlights and how precise I need to be. 'If I'm painting with a lot of light washes I am as precise as possible because filling in later will show on light washes.' In this instance with the dog portrait precision was not so important as using dark colours I am able to paint in any white I don't want at a later stage as you will see from my photos.
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Once I have applied the blocking fluid and it is all dry, I lay down my base colours. These tend to be light washes that I gently build up in parts for the painting, go in too heavy on the colour to start with and all could be lost.
To lay a wash, I first prepare my colour palette, then I wet the area where I want to apply colour, now I add colour gently loading the colour in the places where I want the wash to be darker, often trying the colour on a separate piece of scrap paper to make sure the colour is not to heavy or to light before applying to my painting.
Colours need to be prepared in advance because lying down washes needs to be a fairly quick process, as the water you laid down before starting will soon dry up. You can add more water to keep the wetness open for longer, but try not to do this to many times or you could lose the sublet differences in the wash.
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Stage three - Building the detail.
At this point I am happy with my base. I have the shade and light just where I want it and now it's time to add the detail. First I remove the blocking fluid from much of the painting with my fingertips to reveal the white areas but leave areas such as the eyes and nose for later.
Then I start to build detail in the large areas of fur around the face with a fine brush, starting with the lightest shades first. For example Titch being a black & White dog, I started by building up the black fur areas first with fine strokes in the areas around my highlights, but I don't us pure black to start with. I start with lighter shades of black (i.e. slightly watered down black or dark grays) and some dark blue and build the detail slowly. These gradual layers will give depth to the image.
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Next onto the white area around the mouth/mussel and under the chin. Here I build up layers of fine hair with a fine brush using two or three colours, in this case, darkish brown, light-ish brown and opaque white, this helps to give the soft, tender fleshly feel to the dogs mouth.
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Moving onto the eyes, here I add a rich warm light-ish brown wash and add in darker browns with a fine brush to the edge of the eyeball, this gives the glassy feel to the eye. When this is dry and I'm happy with the brown area of the eye, I add the black iris to the eye and them I add the eyeliner around the edges of the eye. When every thing is dye I remove the blocking fluid from the eye area and tidy up the highlights by adding more white or reducing them with black if needed.
Allowing the black paint to dry, I then start to work some opaque white into the highlights left by the blocking fluid and I add highlight else where if needed, in this case on the ears. As this point I work with both black and white paint refining the highlighted areas until I am happy with the result.
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Once the paint is dry I work in more detail, adding dots with a fine brush gives texture to the dogs nose. When I happy with the nose and eyes I remove the blocking fluid and add a little more detail to soften the highlights.
I then bring up the highlighted whiskers with opaque white and tidy them up with whatever colour surround them, in this case mostly black, where needed. Finally I add the finishing touches to the throat area, I kept this simple due the quality of the image I was given. I built up light layers of white, gray and cream using strokes that suggest curly hair and left it at that.
Finally I leave it for a day and then return to see if there's anything I want to tweak and below is the end result.
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