Pet Portraits in Oil

When painting portraits everything has to be as perfect as possible, so sometimes it's good to just paint something messily and freely, and to practice with new mediums and techniques.

This is from a beautiful photo I found on morguefile (I'm not sure if I'm finished with it yet);

And here are some more scribbles I've been experimenting with;

Brewood in Staffordshire (painted ages ago, and will be re-painting because I love the photograph);

Lastly, this is my first pencil pet portrait of a corgi. I know it's nothing special but I want to start offering pencil portraits as well as oil because I can charge a lot less for them. Need to practice a lot more first though. This took me about 3 mins! Ignore the nose, I just scribbled it on : )

I've re-done ALL of my gallery images, which has taken forever, and I've added new images to each individual portrait page to show the portrait progress and a couple of close-ups. Here are some of the new images; the rest can be seen in the gallery.

I was asked to paint some chickens on to a terracotta pot, which I first thought would be unsuccessful as the usual medium for outdoor artwork is acrylics, as far as I know, not oils. It turned out okay in the end, although the colour easily sunk for the first few layers, and the surface was completely different to linen canvas. My brushes wore out extremely quickly!

I painted three chickens all around the pot, this is one of them, and the pot has to stay indoors for at least 6 months now before it can be varnished ready to go outside.

This was the first 'proper' oil painting that I attempted a few years ago now when I was about 18 years old, I loved painting it so I continued with the same medium creating pet portraits.

This portrait isn't finished, still quite a long way to go, but I'm really enjoying painting Tilly. She is such a pretty and happy girl! The background is too dark at the moment, so lighter layers will be added later on, and the grass will be highlighted, as well as a load of bluebells : )

I loved painting Zac, he looked like he felt very sorry for himself, and it was nice trying to capture that expression. I think he was well suited to the warm background colour, I chose it for him because it was similar to the colour of his eyes, and it also allows his black and white fur to stand out from the background. Backgrounds are very important to a portrait, for example, it is not a good idea to paint a white dog onto a white background, or a black dog onto a dark background.

I didn't take many photos of the progress for this portrait, there are just so many dogs that I couldn't keep up with it all! This is a large portrait, painted on a 24x18 canvas board for ease of framing.

This portrait was created from 7 seperate photographs of the dogs, so the composition had to be suitable. To stop the painting seeming too 'cluttered' I painted a very simple and calm background that fades into the distance to create a feeling of space. I also had to make sure that the light source appeared to be coming from one main direction.