Well, being me I've gotten annoyed with background v 3.0 also looking crappy on my other puppy so what to do? Start a second painting of course. Here's the start of "Charlie" a 5x7" acrylic on canvas Still rough of course.

Meanwhile I sketched this one:

"Rainy Day Blues" 5x7 Ink and paper

And in the fine tradition of "bite off more than you're likely able to chew", I signed on for a "Sketchbook In A Month" for October on the Wet Canvas site. One member had a da Vinci sketchbook they'd not much used, which had a little blurb in it stating that if you wanted to learn to draw well you should fill a sketch book every month. (In other words, practice lots!) Well it was decided to run that as a challenge and a bunch of people signed on for it with a choice of sketchbook size and number of pages. I bought an Eraldo di Paolo, A5, 60pgs. While not the most flash it's still nice looking and portable but... that will mean filling about 2 pages every day! A tad ambitious someone also working around small kids, dogs etc!

Some quickie sketch studies

Marker/pen on regular old art diary paper. Most about 5x7"-ish... I needed a break from trying to wrestle out what the heck I want to do about the background of my poor puppy painting. Sheesh, who'd have thought it'd be the background that'd be the hardest bit?!?

"Judges Choice"

"Summer Walk"

"Veterans Day"

"I Can Haz A Belly Rub?"

"Future Flyball Champion" (Positive thinking hey?)

The old foggie chasing after the birds who were blatantly unperturbed coasting high above her, probably wondering what the mad thing was runnning in great circles for.

Acrylic experiement

My grandma used to do oil painting and she was quite good! I've said for awhile I want to go have some lessons and learn to paint but lack the time and funds to do oils, so when I found myself in the dollar store looking at canvases I decided to get a little set of acrylics, a canvas, some brushes and have have a dabble.

I sketched this little fellow, roughed him in over about 15 mins of breakfast the next morning and started in on the details today. The background is going to change don't worry!

And here he is again after about half an hour. Hopefully over the coming week I can find a bit of kid-free time to work on him as he's still in need of a lot of refining!

And a closer up view of his widdle fluffy face...

Puppy is an Aussie Shepherd bred by the late Robyn Sutcliff of Sugargum Kennels in 2006. The sire was Trig aka Gr Ch Dykinta American Trilogy and the dam Elle (I think!) aka Ch. Sugargum Strike it Rich. I'm not which pup as they were all rather alike in looks! LOL

Verity

Not having posted for ages probably makes me the big slacker EVER but in the interest of attempting to be slightly better...

"Verity"

8x10
Watercolour pencil on cardstock

I'm still not totally happy with this portrait. I have put a number of previous ones in the fire because they didn't capture her right. This still doesn't. But I needed to make myself finish one or I'd have never done so I think. And I see technical details like I had a hard time with the right eye because the photo I used was blurry and had bad exposure. She had iris colombomas so she tended to squint where the lights (coming from the right in the photo, hence the 'softer' right eye) were but I had to change the lighting a bit in the painting. The muscles around the jaw aren't quite right either and lack definition and rigidity near the corner of the lip while being too soft under the jaw. But I wanted to use the watercolours and working in colour again because I find them harder than pencil to use with any sort of realism and I wanted to save this picture because it wasn't good enough to print but I couldn't bear not to keep it anyway so from that point of view I'm happy with it.

5x7 watercolour/pencil
This is another older one just after I'd got the new set of watercolour pencils. Suffice to say I have learnt to use more watercolour technique since by FAR since this one! LOL I'm not sure who the dog is. He was a dog brought to one of the ASCV shows but I think just as a pet.

Black Tri
8 x 5.5" (20 x 14 cm)
Pencils on paper with watercolour background and tinting in the eyes.

Well... this is an experiment on a couple counts.

First in that I mucked about with a new technique and put some colour in the eyes despite it being a black/white pencil sketch.

Second - and the reason why the white is distinctly GREY and the detail in shading isn't showing particularly well and there appears to be a crease in the upper left corner- my ratbag child decided to use my scanner as a trampoline (argh, what possessed you to do that La?!?!?) and now it makes a lovely grinding noise instead of scanning so I tried to take the picture with my camera instead, which hasn't been terrifically successful.

I so need a new photo resizing program. The one I have now is ancient and giving me such grief, freezing up all the time! (Gee I wonder why, it's only made to work with Windows 95 and for US computer...)

"Levi"
8 x 5.5" (20 x 14 cm)
Watercolour

Sierra - U AG I Samilyn Too Qute To Be Tru CGC HIC
4x4" (10x10cm)
Pencils on paper

Quick sketch of moving Aussie Shepherd - not thrilled with this but it was a quickie!
5wx4h" (12.7x10.6 cm)
Pencil on paper


Poster Illustration style Aussie Shepherd Standing Portrait
5.5wx8h (14x20cm)
Pen, marker and water-colour on paper