A New Look for Pets

8/16/25 (all sketches made with photo references)

Just a couple of weeks ago I had mentioned that I was thinking about ways to change up my pet portraiture style. At the time, I didn’t have a specific client or project in mind, but an opportunity to put a new style to work came up serendipitously. I’ll tell you about that soon, but here are some sketches I’ve been doing as practice for that opportunity.

My main M.O. for these sketches is that they have to be fast to execute – like less than five minutes each. I wanted them to fit on an A5-ish size page or sketchbook, so I practiced in an 8-by-5 inch Moleskine (the old kind with the weird, thick, smooth paper that evokes manila file folders; I don’t generally like this paper, but it’s great with ink). For both speed and expressiveness, I chose my favorite Pentel Pocket Brush Pen. Initially, my plan was to use only that, but since the black ink took less than five minutes, I pulled out a gray Faber-Castell Pitt Artist Pen with a brush tip to add a bit of shading. The shading isn’t essential, but it does define the forms of the heads better than the brush pen alone.

My goal with these is to capture the animal’s essence without necessarily being an accurate resemblance (which I do try to achieve when I make more finished colored pencil drawings for commissions). Although I want to continue practicing proportions so that I can be reasonably accurate without making measurements, I’m pleased with the fresh, comic-y look of these sketches.

(All of these were made with reference photos that I had used previously during the past couple of years for commissioned colored pencil portraits.)