Goliath

 

5/13/25 Goliath (reference photo by Katelyn This)

Look at that grin! It gave me great joy to draw a pup as happy as Goliath.

It also made me feel rusty. After making nearly 90 pet portraits by a year ago, I then tapered off on commissions to focus on downsizing, and I’ve done only a few sporadically in the past year. I guess I didn’t forget how to draw, but my process was off. I used to have sets of “dog pencils” and “cat pencils” (mainly it’s the eye colors that differ) picked out, so it was fast and easy to choose from them. I also forgot which Uni Pin fineliner point size I prefer to use to draw the eyes, and I think I should have used a finer one here.

Finally, when I moved into my new studio and unpacked my drawing table, I had to choose which top-tier, most-often-used colored pencils would be on the desktop (while the rest were in drawers). Although Faber-Castell Polychromos had long been the desktop choice for non-soluble pencils, I was thinking about how I often end up getting out Prismacolors anyway, so I decided to change it up, put the Polys in a drawer, and put the Prismas on top. When I started drawing Goliath, I reached into the desktop cups, picked out Prismacolors to use . . . and as soon as I started drawing, I remembered how delicious the pairing used to be between Polychromos and my current drawing paper of choice, Stonehenge Lenox Cotton. As much as I often prefer Prismas to Polys, that paper has a bit too much tooth for a soft pencil like Prismacolor. So I stopped abruptly, picked out all the same colors in Polys, and I immediately felt like I was home.

A slow and rusty start, but fun the rest of the way.

Although all of that threw me off a bit when I began, I soon got into the groove and realized how much I had missed making pet portraits. I’d like to go back to doing them, but not at such a continual pace as before. I have to figure out how to get occasional commissions but not too many. (I’m still donating all proceeds to Dog Gone Seattle, my favorite local pet rescue and adoption organization.)  

Color note: One tricky thing about drawing a dog head-on is indicating the head form. If I shaded the unlighted side of Goliath’s head with the same brown as the subtle spots in his mostly white fur, it could look like I had mistakenly colored that side of his head brown. I typically choose gray for such shading, but suddenly my color temperature class lessons came to light: Though subtle, the facial shading in the reference photo was the coolest area. How about trying blue? I know it’s subtle and may not even be apparent in the finished drawing, but I used Polychromos Delft Blue to shade the head as well as to enhance all the darkest areas of features. I was pleased to be thinking in terms of color temperature instead of picking gray on autopilot.

Ahhhh....tools at my fingertips, and all I had to do was sit down and draw!

Ahhh, it felt so good to simply sit down at my clear desk and start drawing! Before beginning any desk-based work in my former studio, I used to spend an annoying amount of time moving stuff around to clear a space large enough to work on, and then later moving it all back onto the desk so that it wouldn’t get in my way wherever that stuff had landed temporarily (often the floor). This feeling is probably the single biggest benefit of downsizing!