This is yet another spaniel, this one is called Rusty. Due to the fact that I own a springer and as an animal portrait artist these are my favourite breed of dogs. My Dad has owned about 8 now so springers have always featured. Rusty comes to work everyday, at the Forestry Commission (the same as Milly who is being portrayed on another pencil portraits page). He is a lively charactor, about two years old, who is definitely a keen employee running about the woods and digging for most of the day. Rusty, as with all my spaniel dog paintings, will be in coloured pencils as he has such lovely colouring. This is the second set of photographs I have taken of Rusty and I much prefer this image to the previous one. For an animal portrait artist it is vital to have good reference images to use to enable a life-like commission to be produced.
Having spent two days working with Rusty, I decided it was time to get on with his portrait, the latest of my spaniel pencil portraits from photos.I have started work on Rusty's head. Rusty is liver and white springer but he has a very red tinge to his fur which is very pretty. There is to be more blending as the portrait progresses but you can already see Rusty's features starting to take shape. Rusty is also a very clean dog, when I took the image above he had been running around most of the day in the wood and racing around with several other dogs including a Northern Innuit dog which is almost wolf like amongst others, but he still managed to look very clean in the photo, almost as though he had been to the dog parlour! If you look closely at the image above, Rusty is sat on very large and heavy picnic table and benches that myself and his owner Dave spent most of a day digging into the ground. What a job that was!!!
Work has continued on Rusty's head and is now continuing down his shoulders. There has been further blending of pencils across Rusty's head to give an impression of the shine of his fur but it is a balancing act to ensure not too many pencil strokes are lost as these give the impression of individual hairs. I have began to work down Rusty's body and chin, the line underneath his chin is too hard at the moment and will need softening but his chest will need much more work to create the shadows. So far I have spent about 6 hours in total on this pencil portrait.
I have continued down Rusty's body and have completed most of his right front leg. So far I have used a very limited range of colours for his chest, mainly french grey and chinese white with just gunmetal and chocolate used to create shading so as to give the appearance of depth. Rusty is really beginning to look more 3d and realistic at this stage.
Rusty's portrait is now complete. I felt he would look better on grass rather than on the picnic bench. Unfortunately the grass has turned out a little bluer than it really is, I will endeavour to fix this problem on future progress reports.
Pencil Portraits from Photos Dog paintings by animal portrait artist Karie-Ann Cooper 
