The commission I was asked to do a few weeks ago was of two female French Bulldogs and fortunately I was given a great photo to work from which I’ll show here so you can see what I was working to create.
The painting was to be in acrylics on board so the first thing I did was to cut the artboard to size then draw out the image of the two dogs.
When that was drawn out I could put blocks of colour in to seal the artboard, so all I needed to do was the basic tones of yellow ochre for the background, white and grey and blacks for the dogs.
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The third stage was to do another block layer of colour which properly sealed the board.
Stage four was to paint the white dog since she was in the background, and also the background carpet, which was quite detailed as you can see from the photo, so I wanted to hint at it without drawing out every tiny detail of it, which would have detracted from the dogs which are the focal point.
Stage five was the darker dog and lead and fine tuning the details on the white dog. The reason I love acrylics so much is because I can build up the fine details of the fur, and light over dark, dark over light the makes the tones of their form. And also the shadows underneath the dogs to show they are sitting on the carpet, not hovering over it!
The next stage shows the finished the painting.
And the final stage is the painting in the frame which I think matches the colours beautifully in the background colours. The painting is in acrylics on board, the image is 17.5 x 15.5 and is called ‘Peanut and Evie’.
