This bright-eyed intelligent looking dog is the next commission up on my easel and it's a big A1 canvas board. I've been itching to start this one as I had a lot of lovely photos to choose from and I thought this pose summed him up well. He seems to love the outdoors and is eager to play. I spent a good time sketching out the fur and getting Otto onto the right part of the canvas for a pleasing composition. I decided to focus particularly on his head and eyes so this will be painted in detail with the surrounding fur and pebbles in soft focus. I established the eyes, nose and mouth first, just to give myself an anchor point. It's quite useful for me to see the photo of the painting with the original photo at the same size on this blog as I'm working with such a size difference on canvas. For the next stage I started painting in the pebbles: I included quite a few different earthy colours in them to start with and then unified them with more greens. I may knock the colours back even more later if they distract too much from Otto. At the third stage I've started painting the shadows in Otto's fur, putting base colours of pinks and browns underneath where the fur covers his ears and eyes. The layers of detail are being applied... I may be some time!
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