This set of Cairn Terriers and Norfolk Terrier is one of the most extensive pet portrait paintings I have painted yet. The four Terriers were first photographed separately, see their original photos. Later, I pieced them together using photoshop to arrange my composition. I needed the dogs to be the focal point, being large enough without looking cramped while at the otherend not looking so small that there would be a lot of empty space around them. Next, I set to building my canvas. During this time, I thought about how to make this painting a gem. I wanted the background to really have depth of color, like a ruby. This meant many layers of crimson glazes to build up background. The terriers were rendered in a crimson underpainting; however, that is mostly covered up at this point.

These are the original pictures…

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 27th, 2007 at 7:16 pm and is filed under Dog Portraits. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.