Shelties - work in progess

Pebbles & Golly
More work to do darkening down the shady areas

very small reference photos!

Competition winner's portrait finished

Here's Blu, all finished. A4 is the smallest size I do as I find working small quite hard; it's difficult to get in the detail to get it to look lifelike. I'm pleased with this one though; haven't done a pencil drawing for a while and really enjoyed it. In the photo, Blu's left tooth was covered by his tongue. It looked odd when I copied it so I've popped it back in!  If you'd like me to do a portrait this size of your pet, I have an offer on at the moment - see my website for more details.

The competition was run in conjunction with Portsmouth's About My Area website which is a fantastic source of what's going on where in the local area.

Sultan - amendments to contrasts

Working German Shepherd, Sultan

 Just about there now, waiting for my client to give it the thumbs up.  Next up is a graphite portrait of a staffie - the winner of Portsmouth's AMA dog photo competition.

Diesel, ready to go home . . .

Diesel, A3 pastels on velour paper

Greetings cards on Folksy

My Folksy Page

Sophie

A3 pastels on velour

New Commission: Scooby, Springer Spaniel

It's always exciting, starting a new commission! My workstation's all organised, pastel pencils sharpened and I'm ready to go. So far then I've just started shading in the darker areas, particularly around the nose and eyes.

This portrait is on Hahnemuhle velour paper and I'm using mainly Faber-Castell pastel pencils, a few Derwent and conte crayons.

Close-up of the first shaded areas

He's beginning to take shape . . .

Today I darkened down the darker areas of fur with black conte pastel.  The mouth I gave a layer of pale blue covered with two different pinks; I'll come back to this at the end.  The eyes: I used three different browns; again, I'll continue with the fur then go back and make a few more changes to them to sharpen the definition.  For some reason I find noses incredibly difficult!  It doesn't make sense, I know, because I find eyes and mouth ok, but I'm building the nose very slowly as velour paper isn't very forgiving with mistakes!

Bertie

Now working on a new commission called Bertie.  This is just a preliminary sketch, investigating  how I'm going to tackle his mass of curly black fur!  What a lovely expression though; I'm going to enjoy this.

Rocky completed

Here he is, all finished and set in a mount.  He was taken to the post office - but being Wednesday pm - they were shut - what an old-fashioned practice that is.