Thursday, January 28, 2010

Black Lab Portrait with Hunting Scene Landscape Background


This is one of the pet portraits I finished recently.  This guy's name is "DumbDog".  Now, that's not his real name, it's a nickname, and it's not descriptive of this really smart, wonderful fellow.  It's like calling a giant dog "Tiny" or a heavy one "Slim".  One of those silly, affectionate nicks that just stuck.

Of course, Labs love the water, and so I posed him in an environment he loves:  Ready, willing and able to dive right into that marshy wetlands water behind him.

We live near the Heinz Wildlife Preserve that borders Philadelphia on one side and my small borough on the other and often walk with Otto there. Besides the birds of every description, if you're observant, you get to see turtles and frogs, small mammals and lots of deer.  We get a lot of spillover from the birds who live there and stop there on their migrations at our bird feeders less than a mile away.  (We also are gifted by the mosquito visits!).

At one time, of course, much of the surrounding area was wetland...this is one of the only protected urban wetlands left. 

But back to DumbDog.  The specs are that this is a colored pencil portrait, 16" x 20" with prismacolor and color soft colored pencil on Mi Tientes pastel paper.

Another thing this portrait did for me was make me really want to paint outdoors, maybe plein air for all of it or maybe part of it with studio time to finish up.  But that's not going to be colored pencil, which takes too long.  So, I'm currently enrolled in an oil painting class to fill in the gaps of my self-taught painting technique.  There's just a lot of science involved with the mediums used with oils that I need to understand, plus I just love hanging out with other artists and art lovers.  And of course, I'll be showing you my work here and on my Facebook Art Page, HERE which is my short and sweet show and tell!  See you there!!

4 comments:

thephillydog said...

Adorable!!!! (I loved Tanker, too) :)

Robin said...

Why, thank you, Phillydog!

Metalsgirl said...

Your paintings are absolutely lovely!!

Robin said...

Thanks, Metalsgirl! 3d? Um...I hope thanks!