Custom Portrait Commission of Twinkie a Cocker Spaniel
This is an update to Twinkie's portrait. Over the weekend I did a life painting session on Instagram and kept some clips to show the painting progression for this portrait commission.
Here is the video
I have been working on another portrait commission of a Cocker Spaniel named "Twinkie" who has long crossed the rainbow bridge. His owner only had a few photo and really wanted to use a black and white photo for the colored painting.
The first thing I did after seeing the reference photo was to figure out how to turn the black circles back into eyes. After that was done I used filters and a lot of tweaking until the reference photo took on some color. In the process we even discovered that the background had a flowering bush!
I always love it when from a rough sketch a figure starts to emerge, even if this is totally the ugly duckling stage of the painting.
At this stage I am not at all concerned with details. All I want is to put color on the canvas and somewhat get everything where it is supposed to go.
Every layer build upon the previous one. For now everything still looks like a loose wash. As the paint dries in one area I can continue work in another. Now slowly more and more paint gets added until it is time to work on the details.
