Merry Christmas to all

Merry christmas to all my readers from the snow-clad banks of the river Hamble.Thankyou all so much for all the lovely enthusiastic comments ive received this year.I hope you will continue to enjoy the art here in 2011,my very best wishes to you all.

Labrador commission progress

With the background toning finished for the moment ive now made a start on Amber the labrador.Because she's quite pale in colouration i wanted to set up my tonal values for the piece by drawing the darkest areas first,in this instance Amber's nose and muzzle.Doing a couple of dark areas first makes it easier to judge the tones on her coat and therefore i can approach this element with confidence knowing exactly which grades of pencil will suffice.under normal circumstances progress would be relatively rapid from this point in the drawing but as its almost christmas with all that that entails the drawing will be a little stop/start on occasion.

Background developing

The background to this piece is slowly developing thanks to multiple layers of H,HB and B grade pencil.i'm now starting to work up the abstract shapes in the background that will serve to add a little interest and bring out certain areas of the dogs face.

Start of a new commissioned drawing

Not very exciting to look at i know but this is the very initial stages of my latest project.The drawing is a commissioned piece featuring a lovely labrador called Amber whom i was privileged to spend a couple of hours with getting some lovely reference photo's and just generally getting a handle on the dogs character to try and get that across in the finished drawing.what you see here so far is the result of a couple of days work.the first stage in all my drawings is naturally to work up an outline from my references on bits of old cartridge paper which once i'm happy with it i trace onto my prepared drawing paper.the paper is hot pressed watercolour paper which has been immersed in water and then stretched onto my drawing board and left to dry overnight,this results in a lovely subtle 'tooth' which grabs just the right amount of graphite without being too rough or smooth.the next stage of this particular drawing is to create an abstract,blurry background to enhance and push forward the dogs head.here i have already painstakingly layed down one layer of H grade pencil over a period of hours and now i'm beginning a second layer using the same pencil.as i work up the background i will progress through several different grades of pencil,layering and blending as i go to create the effect i want to achieve.the background alone is likely to take many days to get right until i can make a start on the animal itself.as a final note i'd like to add that in the last week i had a bit of a disaster with my laptop which i managed to well and truly fry and lost a good deal of data and in particular most of my email contacts and so i would be obliged if any of my clients reading this would be good enough to just drop me a line so that i can retrieve email and contact details.luckily my photo library is safe and sound and i'm slowly getting to grips with my new laptop and new operating system.

presenting 'Jiji' 9" x 8.5"

I'm calling the drawing complete now.the drawing is slightly looser than my usual style,governed mainly by the reference available however i think ive managed to capture the essence of Jiji and i hope her owner will be pleased.

Dog portrait almost complete

with the head of the dog complete except for some minor tweaking later ive moved onto the neck area and in particular the task of re-creating the lovely long curly fur found there.once the correct tone has been achieved by layering graphite several times over i can start to use the pencil in much looser,long strokes to try and emulate the long hair.here you can see my initial long strokes plotting out the general fur direction,these i will elaborate on and define further until it looks natural and soft.

a day at the drawing board

start of day

Lunchtime

Evening

i thought i would post the progress of my latest commission as i worked on it throughout the day yesterday.This portrait of Jiji is being created from some slightly poor quality reference photo's taken on a mobile phone and so i'm unable to see all the details necessary to undertake a really detailed study.in this instance ive opted to go for a slightly looser style to accomodate the lack of detail.the looser style still allows me to capture a little of the character and hopefully the 'look' of jiji.

retriever drawing-a little progress

some progress to report here as i slowly layer graphite onto the dogs face building up shape and form.the left hand side of the face is almost complete now and ive done some more work on the jaw area.jiji is slowly starting to appear and hopefully by my next posting should be looking very familiar to her owner.