Tuesday, November 8, 2011

Charlotte


This is for Studio Atelier Oct 2011 challenge, Paint Your Pet. It's oil on 12x12 inch stretched canvas.

I'm so glad the deadline for this challenge has been extended as I needed time to finish this painting. When I saw this challenge (ref), I wanted to do it, but I didn't have a good picture of our dog. Then one day our dog did nice pose and held the pose long enough for me to snap a picture on my iPhone.

We got our dog earlier this year from the SPCA. I read in the newspaper in the beginning of the year that an illegal dog breeder had been raided, and there were over 100 pure bred dogs confiscated. These poor dogs had been locked up in cages for the purpose of having babies to be sold by the breeder. Some of these dogs were in pretty bad shape. The ones in better shape were up for adoption. My younger son and I went to the SPCA, and saw this beautiful Pomeranian, very gentle and very calm. She's eight years old and thus is already an old lady. When we got her, she had an ear infection, nuclear sclerosis, and just gotten spayed, but she's so gentle and such a cutie, so we took her home. We named her Charlotte because my younger son was reading EB White's Charlotte Web at the time so we named her after the nice spider in the story.

To paint this, my son helped me painted the background black using acrylic paint, and also the under-color for the dog an orange red color. The oil color I used for the painting included cadmium orange, burnt sienna, cadmium yellow deep, gold orchre, ultramarine violet, and white. I first blocked in the dog with big strokes of colors, but not too thick in paint. Then I used smaller brushes to refine the color, and finally a very thin brush to paint in the whiskers and suggestions of individual hair.

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