Dug a little deeper into the high key overexposed painting thing again this week. I’ve been wanting to do a portrait of  Kevin, our other mastiff for a little while now. He’s such a sweet old boy.

Had it in my head to do like a “night lighting” portrait of him. He’s blind, and his eyes have that cloudy look to them that i think could look cool in that lighting scenario. But then a couple days ago,  I snapped a blown out photo of him sleeping, and was drawn to the abstract vignetted quality of it, so I decided to give it a shot. Here’s where we’re at so far.

Gridded this out because I really wanted to make sure I got the shapes as close to the reference as I could. There’s so little to work with, it was important to make sure the drawing was as solid as possible. I spent the evening carefully plotting it out and did a very light line drawing focusing on proportion and placement.

Its a pretty minimal palette, Payne’s gray, ultramarine blue, transparent oxide red, cobalt turquoise, unbleached and regular titanium white, and the tiniest bit of alizarin crimson and pthalo blue for a couple of accents. (theres some indian yellow there I didn’t end up using too :))

I used mostly hogs hair brushes and no medium in order to get the dry brushed effect on the fur. Used a pointed round to draw the more defined wrinkles and shapes in, and then used some more of a blown out ones to carefully build up my textures carefully dragging the paint in the direction of the hair on his face.

I really try to pay attention and not go too heavy on anything, because the wrong mark can ruin the effect. It’s a slow careful build up.

Used linseed oil for his nose area because I wanted to go a little more impasto,  and slipperier paint just makes it easier to get that nose texture happening. After a few hours in I forced myself to stop on order to not overwork it.

Think I’m just gonna let it dry and then sand back in before any final adjustments.

Speaking of which,  here’s a final shot of that painting of my dearest Bob from last month. Finished out the grass, the background, and fixed a ton of small stuff on the figure. Do you still refer to it as “the figure” if it’s a dog? Dunno what else I’d call it to be honest lol.