My portrait of my dear dog Daisy is finished now. In addition to portaying her sweet spirit, I had an art goal in mind. A few years ago I took a workshop from Carel Brest van Kempen who is a wonderful artist and a Master member of the Society of Animal Artists. As part of the class,, students were to bring a few examples of their work and one of the pieces I took was a drawing of the head and bust of an older Golden Retriever. I was fairly pleased with the drawing, but Carel observed that it had a flatness to it. So when working on this piece, I kept in mind that I wanted to be sure to portray depth.
I hope I succeeded, mainly in painting the white areas. I used three different whites, keeping the lightest to only a few areas.
Common art wisdom is to avoid using black and to use white very sparingly. So in this piece I have broken at least one of those rules. I actually like using black. But I did use burnt umber and dioxazine purple with it.
My final step was to tone down most of the red background with washes of burnt umber.
great painting! love the red background!
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