Meet Liam and Clyde, two very handsome black ladbradors. As you can see the labrador at the back (Clyde) had his head cut off in this photo, luckily his owner had taken a very similar photo so I stuck them together, unfortunately the second image was blurred and could not be used as the main reference. As you can tell, it is possible for a pet portrait artist to use several references to produce the final portrait
The first stage was drawing in the two dogs, then I used a blue and dark grey to note areas of shade and highlights.
The work starts on Clyde, he looks very serious in his pose as though he is studying something. Both dogs had really shiny fur and I used many layers to recreate it, I used a burnishing pencil to blend the colours together and then a white to bring out the shine
Then I turn my attention to Liam, as he is closer to the foreground of the portrait his shadows and shine show up more, he had a lot of blue on his head, when I put the first layer of blue down it did look very odd but as more layers were added and blended together the portrait began to make more sense.
Pencil Portraits from Photos by Pet Portrait Artist Karie-Ann Cooper 
