There is nothing that distinguishes animal portrait painting from human portrait painting except for the fact that animals don't like posing. Maintaining the animal's attention is a real feat for an artist. An expert in this particular field is a female artist of Wilmington. She is a member of the famous Delaware family. Her grandfather is a painter who created a collection of sea and landscape paintings which became famous. It's no shocker that by age 3, this female artist was already painting.
Most of the time, she drew animals. Her first one man show took place at the local library when she was 10, and she began illustrating children's books two years later. She got to learn how to dance a number of different kinds of dances because of the help she had been getting from her Philadelphia teachers. She did solo performances in dance for a long time and was even known for a very convincing death portrayal in one of her dances.
In painting, dogs are her main interest, although she does portraits of many kinds of animals. It is interesting to watch her as she begins doing the dog's portrait. As the owner helpfully tries to keep the dog still, she is already drawing several sketches on her sketch pad.
She tries to find the pose that would be most characteristic of the dog, all the while that her pencil flies over the sketchpad. She compliments the dog on his appearance and behavior in the meantime. To keep the animal interested, she uses different typs of props. She makes a request from the owner of the dog for photographs that may be in his possession and asks if it's possible to make copies of some of them for her collection. She matches the colors of the snips which she collects from the dog's tails, ears, and tummy. The snips are kept under the dog's file.
Selecting the pose and the composition with a good background is the next step. The latter is decided based on the animal or type of dog. She actually decided on sitting in a duck blind to make the sketches for the background of a Chesapeake Bay retriever portrait.
Animals can show taste or distaste toward something, she pointed out. This was proven by a damaged painting which had been chewed upon by an American pointer who seemed to show disgust for it. It took a large amount of medication to treat the dog after that incident, so the painting must have really not appealed to him.
On the back of the portraits of beagles of bassets, she puts the kennel club's identifying symbols, and for the scenery in the picture, she includes a paw print. She has even obtained abstract backgrounds done with the help of her own dog's paw when he cooperates in painting. Cooperation is not an animal's gift to man in most cases. A whole day's worth of painting was wasted when one of the models left with one of the female dogs. Not so ordinary things seem to take place when the painting of an animal's portrait is being made.
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You can get resources on pet portrait paintings by visiting this site.For resources on pet paintings from photos check out this site.
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