Sunshine Flu at Gas Works Park

 

4/18/25 Gas Works Park

I suspect that half the city had called into work last Friday with a bad case of “the sunshine flu.” With the temperature hitting 70 and the sky a clear blue, everyone was celebrating a much-needed reprieve from winter.

I invited Natalie and Kim to join me at Gas Works Park, which is always the first place I think of when the weather turns unseasonably beautiful. All those sunshine flu sufferers? They were reveling, as were we.

Diary Comics from My Head

 

11/12/24

My imagination-based diary comics continue, inspired by the prompts and template I learned from Drewscape. I’ve been making these at the end of the day when I’m tired, have the lowest level of creative energy (and apparently the messiest penmanship!), and the hardest time being motivated to sketch. Given all of those potential barriers, I really need a structured format to draw from my head.

11/13/24

The Nov. 13 page (above) does not follow Drewscape’s format; it’s more of a traditional comics story arc with a linear sequence. It happened to fall into place because of the events of the day, but on an ordinary day when not much happens, coming up with this type of arc is usually much more challenging. I’ll take them when they come, and use Drew’s prompts when they don’t. In any case, I’m enjoying this process.

11/15/24

InkTober Finale: Lackadaisical

 

Gel ink

Bic ballpoint

I began InkTober 2024 lazily, and I finished lackadaisical. Less than halfway through the month, I was already bored because I didn’t challenge myself enough, which I regret. By the third week, I was just going through the motions. As I always say, what’s the point of doing any drawing challenge if it’s not actually challenging? It bothered me that I didn’t think of a way to push myself harder (and truthfully, I was so preoccupied with my ongoing downsizing tasks that I didn’t want to spend more than 15 minutes a day on InkTober).

Bic ballpoint

Uni Pin and Sakura Micron technical pens

That’s not to say that I didn’t learn anything. Just as I’ve discovered from all my face-parts series, human mouths are fascinating – the infinite range of shapes and forms – and exposed teeth really kicked up both the fun and the difficulty. OK, so maybe it was a bit challenging – I can live with that.

Sailor Fude de Mannen fountain pen and 
Platinum Carbon Black ink

As always, many thanks to Earthsworld for his daily Instagram photo references (all but Oct. 31) that made finding inspiration so easy.

Edited: I just put all my Inktober 2024 sketches into a Flickr album. I rarely make a series that looks consistent throughout, but I do like the way they all look together in a grid!

My apparent tradition for these face-parts series is to end 
with a selfie. ;-)

Fuzzy Portraits

 

9/15/24 Bubba (reference photo by Linda Lee)

8/20/24 Benoit (reference photo by Joanne Tam)

Although I haven’t done a concentration of pet portraits since spring, I still have occasions to do them, and I enjoy having subject matter to keep up my colored pencil chops.

 Last month I wanted to make a surprise gift for a friend, the human who belongs to the pup named Benoit. What a sweet face!

The cat was a commission from a friend who wanted to give the portrait to her mother in memory of Bubba, who had recently crossed the rainbow bridge. Pets who are gone are always special subjects for me, even if I didn’t know the pet personally.

Sometimes I’m lucky enough to sketch a pet live under relatively leisurely circumstances. Visiting a resident at Aegis Living, the fuzzy pup (whose name I didn’t learn) was mostly captive on a lap, giving me a bit of time to sketch.

8/17/24 A fuzzy visitor at Aegis

Pet Portraits

 

6/2/24 Gracie (reference photo by Cindy Smith)

The pups I sketched for yesterday’s post reminded me that I’ve made a few other pet portraits recently that I hadn’t shown yet. At left is Gracie, whom I sketched as a surprise gift for a friend I visited in Portland.

Although I had sketched Ernest Theodore (below) previously from a photo, it was really special to be able to sketch him again, this time from life. Both he and Nyx attended a meet-up of Seattle-area members of a couple of Facebook groups I’m in – Field Nuts and the Erasable Podcast Community. Though not as polished as the portraits I have made from photos, these were certainly more fun (I don't have scans of these sketches because I gave them away on the spot).

6/14/24 Ernest Theodore

6/14/24 Nyx

Tulip Times Two

 

3/11/24

3/10/24 Tulip (both reference photos by Sandie Frakes)

Although I’m taking a break from pet portraits for a while, I had promised two to a donor who had been looking for good reference photos of her pooch Tulip. The first one she sent wasn’t very well lighted, but it seemed like a good candidate for messy hatching (left), which matched Tulip’s messy beard. I had a lot of fun drawing that fur.

The second photo that she sent later was worth waiting for: It was among the best pet reference photos I had used in that it was taken next to a window, casting beautiful light on one side of Tulip’s face. Most of the drawing was done with colored pencils, but I had made an underpainting with Viarco ArtGraf water-soluble graphite on the shaded side. It helped the pencil work to go faster, and it also served as a map so that I wouldn’t inadvertently color too much of the areas I wanted to reserve as the lightest.

Polychromos colored pencils and black, brown and gray technical pens in various sizes

ArtGraf water-soluble graphite underpainting

Polychromos and Museum Aquarelle colored pencils and
Uni Pin technical pen

More Mixed Media Pets

2/19/24 Zoey (reference photo by Linda Eller)

2/18/24 Little Man (reference photo by Linda Eller)

One of the requirements I stipulate when I offer pet portrait commissions is that I get to choose the medium. The main reason is that my choice is usually led by the animal’s color, the quality of the reference photo or just something I want to try. I’m having a lot of fun experimenting with mixed media that I typically wouldn’t use for urban sketches.

2/27/24 Kim (reference photo by Kim Lathan)

This batch has a variety of animals, techniques and media, and most were challenging in different ways. I’ve occasionally sketched horses from life at fairs and such, but most have been bronze statues. As such, I haven’t had much practice sketching horses, let alone their portraits, so the biggest challenge here was Kim. The reference photo was very dark with low contrast. The horse was probably black or dark brown, but rather than struggle with color, I chose to use graphite, which was much easier to manage. I used an eraser to pull out the gray-colored mane, which would have been a lot harder to do with colored pencil! I regret the composition, though – I think this portrait would have been better if I had shown some of her long neck, which was turned gracefully. But the 4-by-6-inch size of the paper can’t hold much more than a head without losing detail, so it was a compromise.

The double portraits of Starfish and Coffee, the two black cats, was also challenging. Black cats never seem to get easier! This time I tried it with colored pencil only and no underpainting (unlike Skuta and Momo, two other black cats, that I drew with an underpainting), which was more time-consuming, but I was hoping to have more tonal control. I’m not sure how much it helped.

2/20/24 Starfish & Coffee (reference photo by Steve Ferris)

On the other hand, I did use a Viarco ArtGraf tailor block as an underpainting for the pup named Patricia, which speeded up the process significantly. I’m always surprised by how well Field Notes Birch Bark cover stock takes wet media. It’s not sized properly for paint, so the pigment seems to sink in rapidly, which makes the medium no longer soluble once it dries. Win-win in a weird way!

Underpainting for Patricia speeded up the process quite a bit!

2/26/24 Patricia (reference photo by Antonia Paxton)

Little Man, the bicolored dog (top of post), was a fun experiment. On the black side of his face, I used an underpainting of ArtGraf and then some messy hatching with a Uni Pin technical pen.

The idea to use black paper for Groot, the white Great Pyrenees, came from the donor who had commissioned the drawing, a fan of my white-on-black nocturnes. When she had suggested it, the idea had never occurred to me, mainly because I’ve been on autopilot with trusted white art-quality papers (or Field Notes). But I had recently purchased a pack of black Uglybooks in the larger size, and the paper is archival. Although it’s flimsier than I would typically use for a commissioned drawing, I figured it would be fine. It was, and Uglybooks’ surface has a wonderful tooth for colored pencil.

2/28/24 Groot (reference photo by Erin Willard)

I’m going to take a break from pet portraits to work on other projects, but these are so much fun that I’ll surely be back for more at some point. The generous donors who have commissioned most of these portraits have helped me raise more than $1,400 for Dog Gone Seattle! You can see them all in my Flickr album.

2/22/24 Skye (reference photo by Grant Klein)

The Eyes Have It

2/11/24 Kooper (reference photo by Chris Green)

2/15/24 Miss Maybelle (reference photo by Kate Eckhoff)

The kitties have been outnumbering the dogs lately, and I’m happy to get more feline practice. On the one hand, cats can be harder to render because their faces have more subtle forms than dogs. On the other hand, I won’t say “all cats look alike,” but in a general way, they do. Once I learned the characteristics that are common in all cat faces, it became much easier to draw them. Dogs, by contrast, seem more distinctly unique – not just from breed to breed but even within one breed.

This batch of pet portraits includes two firsts for me: a young kitten (Miss Maybelle) and a puppy (Kooper, both above). In the same way that human baby faces are not simply miniature adult faces, puppies and kittens have different proportions than their adult counterparts. The most challenging part was surviving the cuteness overload! And both have blue eyes!

2/11/24 Sherlock (reference photo by 
Sarah Kaltsounis)

2/12/24 Tabitha (reference photo by Jill Bartos)

When I show the portraits to the pet owners, I am often complimented on how well I captured their pets’ eyes. As I’ve mentioned before, I usually concentrate more than half the drawing time on the eyes. I know that the owner and the pet often have eye contact, so the eyes are the most recognizable and expressive feature. Even if the fur gets sloppy or my proportions are a little off on the ears, if I get the eyes right, the drawing will usually capture the expression well.

2/15/24 Hemi (reference photo by Holly Thurston)

When I was practicing all those human portraits from Earthsworld’s photos, I didn’t always get much practice on eyes because they were often too small or obscured by shadow to see well. With the pet portraits, I have been asking specifically (though I don’t always get them) for reference photos showing the animals’ eyes in good light, so it’s been fun and rewarding to be able to practice drawing so many eyes. When the lighting is good, a subtle shadow will be apparent at the eye’s top edge across the iris. Something I learned from France Van Stone when we drew human portraits, the shadow is cast by the eyelid. It’s hard to see in dark-eyed dogs, but it’s a little easier to see in cats’ eyes (like Olivia and Hemi, at right and below). If I can observe and capture that kind of detail, the eyes look more natural and realistic.

2/16/24 Olivia (reference photo by Joey Guido)

The most challenging portrait in this group was Olivia (at left). Given two bad reference photos (dark, low contrast, low resolution), I had to make some educated guesses about features or contours I could barely see. One thing, however, was clear in both photos: Olivia was slightly walleyed. This was an unusual and unique feature that I thought was important to capture accurately. When making portraits of humans as well as pets, it’s sometimes tempting to make asymmetrical features more symmetrical, straighten crooked noses, or otherwise make faces more generic. (With human faces, I have sometimes caught myself doing it unconsciously.) But the beauty of individuals is in those lopsided ears, off-center markings and even charming walleyes.

Some portraits take very few materials...

... and others take lots of colors to capture fur details.

Ink-Hatched Dogs

2/10/24 Kelly (both reference photos by Matt Francev)

2/8/24 Alfred

If there’s one thing I’ve learned from my series of pet portraits, it’s the significant challenge of trying to make good drawings from bad reference photos. The ones I received for Alfred and Kelly were both less than ideal: one was out of focus, both were poorly lighted, and the contrast was so dim that I could barely see the forms of their heads. Sadly, they had long ago crossed the Rainbow Bridge; taking better reference photos was not possible.

I have been enjoying using colored pencils for most of the series, but since both of these pups were black and white, they were a good opportunity to try something different: messy hatching with black Uni Pin technical pens (and a little colored pencil for details). Just like human heads, dogs have eye sockets that give the face a predictable form, even if it’s nearly impossible to see. I gave educated guesses (from all my other dog drawings) to do what I could with Kelly.

I couldn’t seem to do that with Alfred – the photo gave me so little information (except that delightful expression) – so I decided to push the cartoony effect that ink hatching invites. Even though the drawing came out flat, I was thrilled to capture his broad smile, which also fits the cartoony effect.

I used colored pencil on Alfred's nose.

3 sizes of Uni Pin pens for Kelly.