Learning from Pets

 

12/30/23 Mingus (reference photo by Brian Grijalva)

I’ve been having so much fun sketching pets and simultaneously experimenting with various media that I started thinking about how I could share my joy in a more beneficial way. Several months ago, I had learned about Dog Gone Seattle, a local pet rescue and adoption organization, from a friend who volunteers there. Based on what I’d heard from friends who were familiar with it, the organization has a wonderful and much-needed mission. I decided to raise funds to donate to Dog Gone Seattle by selling pet portraits.

The feedback I’ve been receiving from the portraits made me think that I might get a good response, and I didn’t want to be overwhelmed by commission requests (nothing kills fun faster than turning it into “work”!). To keep it manageable, I did a limited trial run in a Facebook group that I knew would be amenable, and I sold five immediately. Buyers may choose between a drawing on a Field Notes cover ($30) or on 4-by-6-inch paper ($25). All proceeds go to Dog Gone Seattle. Except for one that was a surprise gift, all portraits shown here were commissions.

12/28/23 Cody (reference photo by Susan Lowe)

12/29/23 Maxwell (reference photo by Holly Thurston)

In addition to being a ton of fun, the portraits are teaching me many things:

• As with human portraits, the single-most important feature is the eyes. I easily spend at least half the drawing time just getting the eyes right.
• When drawing human portraits, I look for the subtle shadows and highlights that are fairly consistent, even if the lighting isn’t ideal – like the tiny highlight on the lower lip or the shadow under the lower lip. It’s the same with dogs: They almost always have a thin crescent of reflected light on the lower edge of the nostril because their noses are damp.
• Anyone who has ever taken a life-drawing class learns the standard proportions of the average human face. I don’t know those standards for dogs and cats (if any exist), and different breeds are all different, so I just learn by measuring and observing.
• I used to think dogs were easier to draw than cats because they have more form to their heads. After drawing Mingus, though, I must concede that dogs are pretty dang hard, too. Something about his boxy, foreshortened snout in the reference photo gave me a lot of time-consuming trouble (but capturing those eyes made up for it). In fact, now that I have a few cats under my belt, I might even say they are generally easier than dogs in terms of facial proportions.
• Lifelong allergies have kept me from owning (or even spending much time with) any cats, so these kitty portraits have probably been my closest observations of felines. Although their eyes are fascinating, Boots and Arianna both have pale-colored irises that made it challenging to show the all-important catchlights. With Boots’ eyes, I simply put more color on one side, hoping to evoke light on the opposite side.

1/2/24 Boots (reference photo by Faith Danner)

12/27/23 Arianna (reference photo by Jac Atticus)

• A trick I got to try on both cats was using an embossing tool to keep their whiskers white.
• Maxwell, the white pup, was by far the easiest in this bunch (but his cohort Timmy, the bearded dragon I showed in my Prismacolor Lightfast review, made up for it by being one of the hardest). I used a wash of ArtGraf water-soluble graphite as the background to keep his white fur from disappearing.

A few more technical notes:

Just for fun (since I remembered to snap the photo), I’m showing here the blocking-in stage for Boots, sketched with an H graphite pencil. I always try to keep blocking-in lines to a minimum, regardless of the final medium.

Blocking-in stage for Boots

With all of these, I used very sharp Faber-Castell Polychromos pencils for the eyes. The rest of the color was done with Polychromos, Prismacolors or Caran d’Ache Museum Aquarelles.