Animals

Over the past couple of days I decided I would try my hand at animal portraiture. First of all to see if I could do them and second of all to hopefully give me another type of portrait to display and hopefully gain commissions from.

I chose to start by trying to draw Man's Best Friend, a dog. So to the left you can see my pencil drawing of Oscar, the oldest of my three pets.

As I was in the mood for trying out new things, I chose to experiment with my materials as well. Choosing black, white, brick red and coffee coloured pencils on grey paper, recreating Oscar in a sepia affect.

I drew him first then shaded using just the black, adding in the white brought the contrast out more in the picture. I then added in the coffee and brick red colours.

I am pleased with the end result, though I feel that the pencil I used gave the image a sheen, so maybe I would use a softer pencil instead of graphite next time. I really felt the sepia affect worked though, especially on Oscar, as Yorkshire Terriers naturally have those coffee and 'reddy' colours in their coat. I also felt I captured his likeness pretty well too.

All in all I think for a first attempt it worked pretty well. I have found parts of the picture I would change and effects I want to play around with more. I think the next step for me is to draw a human portrait in sepia and see how that works out, so watch this space...