Drawing Dogs: A Portrait Process

Kora.

Photography has become my primary mode of creative expression in recent years, but for much of my life, including the period when I was studying art in college, drawing was my preferred medium. Between the migraines and the medications I take to treat them, I have felt that I haven't had the cognitive capacity to answer to the demands of drawing. Photography has been perfect for me because all the effort it requires is for me to be alert in observing the world around me and I am never out of alert mode! So drawing has fallen by the wayside.

But then one of the foster parents for a dog rescue I follow on Facebook started up a project of drawing a dog every single day. Apparently, she, too, had once studied art with a focus on drawing, but had put it aside in recent years. I was so delighted and inspired by the drawings she posts daily on her blog, dogadayart.wordpress.com, that I had to start sketching dogs, too. I don't draw one a day, since my intellectual and creative faculties are not always equal to the task, but I've really enjoyed getting back into drawing. Most of the drawings are small sketches of the dogs I dog-sit, some from photographs and some from life. I've been working a lot in pencil, which is more forgiving than ink, my previous preferred drawing method. I've been posting the dog drawings on my photography Facebook page and they've been a huge hit, so much so that my sister asked if I'd be willing to make a large, custom portrait of her friends' dog for a gift. I agreed and received a photograph of their sweet mutt, Kora, and got to work. I documented my progress because I always like seeing images of works as they progress and thought readers of this blog might enjoy seeing the process.

Sweetheart sketches.

Until I began this portrait, all of my drawings had been made in a 5.5x8.5" sketchbook, so they were, by necessity, rather small. I realized, when I confronted my smooth expanse of 90 lb. vellum paper, that creating a 8x10 image would be too difficult for me to scale accurately in a freehand fashion. My drawing skills were returning as I had made more and more sketches, but I still wasn't up to whipping out a larger scale drawing, especially one that needed to be a realistic likeness, without some assistance. So I took the photo of Kora, pasted it into a Pages (the Mac program) document, enlarged it to 8x10, and drew a 1x1" grid over the image. I then used a ruler and placed a small, faint dot at where each intersection would be on the paper. I then went square by square, lightly sketching in the outlines of the dog's main features and markings. When I was finished, I had a properly proportioned guide of faint lines ready to be filled and transformed.

The original photo with the grid.

The faint outline ensures that my drawing
will be properly proportioned for a realistic look.

For the bulk of the drawing, I used a relatively soft 4B graphite pencil sharpened to a fine point. I am right-handed, so I started in the upper left edge of the image, working my way down and across so that I wouldn't drag my hand through the soft graphite, which will smudge. The smudges are erasable, but the less you have to clean up, the better!

And so it begins!

To make the drawing, I opened the photo without the grid on my computer and expanded it so that it filled my entire screen. I then sat down in my easy chair, some ten feet away, put my cousin's new album on (Jameson & Co.'s "Out of the Canyon on Crutches"), and went to work, typically two hours at a time, which was as much work as my brain and eyes could handle.

The left eye emerges.

One of the ways in which drawing differs from photography is that there are so many different ways to go about it. You can draw realistically or choose a more loosely evocative style. You can make an image extremely detailed or minimally detailed. You have to decide how you will convey textures, colors, and shadows. It made me laugh when a Facebook commenter referenced Magritte's famous "The Treachery of Images" when I posted one of my collie sketches because I'd already been thinking about how, unlike when you photograph something, when you draw it, you are always making an interpretation, a translation of the object. I choose to point my camera in such a way that it shows people things that they don't necessarily see themselves, but everything I photograph is there, in the present, completely real. When I make a drawing, even if the end result is recognizable, it must come THROUGH me.

The left half of the face has been sketched in!

Drawing in a realistic fashion is not something I ever spent much time doing, even when I was drawing a great deal. I was interested in the emotionally evocative power of inked lines, so this way of drawing was new to me. So I thought back to my days of Life Drawing class in college (that's drawing humans from nude models, for those of you who weren't art students) and decided the best way to create a realistic look without messing it up was to draw the light and dark areas. You see, if you try to draw an eye, for example, you will end up drawing your idea of an eye, and chances are, your idea of an eye is not going to look right at all. If you want to draw an eye that looks like an eye and feels like an eye, you are best off drawing the curves, the shadows, the light, the dark, making yourself blind, as it were, to what the thing is, focusing instead on what is there. Part of why I seated myself at a distance from the computer screen displaying the image as I worked was because at a distance, I could more easily shift my focus to see not a dog with eyes and ears and charming spectacle markings, but an abstract form of shapes and shades.

We have a right eye!

Once I had drawn the entire face with the 4B pencil, I used an even blacker and softer 8B pencil to increased the blackness of the dark areas around the eyes and nose. I also smudged gentle layers of the soft 8B graphite over various parts of the fur and features to increase the depth and dimension of the figure.

Dark details have been added; it is now time to start erasing and refining!
You can see some of my fingerprints about the right ear.

I spent a great deal of time fine-tuning the piece, trying to get exactly the right balance of dark to light. I must confess that the right side of the face gave me a great deal of trouble: I erased and redrew it several times trying to get the highlights of the white fur near the eye just right! Ultimately, deciding when to stop working was one of the hardest parts of the process. It's tempting for a perfectionist to simply refine and refine and refine without committing to a final version.

This detail allows you to see the layers of cross-hatching and smudging and erasing that went into giving the muzzle its appearance of three dimensions.

A detail of the work around the eye.

I ended up being extremely pleased with the final result. As I said, I'd never attempted something exactly like this before and was rather impressed by how well it turned out! The many short pencil strokes I'd used for the base layer of the fur on her ears and forehead ended up working perfectly to capture the velvet texture of her fur and my concerted effort to capture the shapes of the light and dark areas on her face paid off as far as giving her muzzle a beautiful, natural, three-dimensional feeling. I'm pleased to report that Kora's owners have received this drawing and love it! I'll still be working on informal sketches, but it looks like there will be more formal dog portraits in my future. Thanks, Laurelin at A Dog A Day, for bringing drawing back into my life!

The finished portrait of Kora.

Interested in commissioning a dog portrait? 

You can contact me through my artist's Facebook page.

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October in Pictures

October is a grand month for taking photographs. Here's what it looked like in my neck of the woods.

An early frost had killed off most of the vegetation at our community garden patch...

...but one stand of sunflowers survived.

Poppy pods.

We grew all of these buttercup and acorn squashes in our community garden plot. We also grew the tomatoes in the background, but not the bananas!

The funny spiky fruit of a dogwood tree.

Because summer heat and dryness lasted into the second week of October, many of the usual indicators of autumn were late in coming. These shrubs were some of the first to turn.

This maple in an exposed spot also provided some early color.

When the rains finally came, the mushrooms soon followed!

The katsura leaves change early every year, so they had all already fallen off the trees when the long dry spell ended.

The arrival of autumn painted the hydrangeas in colors of great complexity.

This creek runs behind the stable where I ride horses. It was there where, for the first time, despite spending 26 autumns in the Pacific Northwest, I saw the salmon returning to spawn for the first time.

Sockeye salmon turn red and green during spawning season.

The photos don't do any justice to the experience of actually seeing them in the flesh.

It was amazing to see these big, bright fish swimming in the creek and to know that they'd survived years in the ocean before returning right here, the place where they were born!

Fallen leaves give this bench a desolate air.

I've been grooming Drifter on the weekends while building strength to start riding again. The other day Syd seemed very sleepy--and was sporting some nice braids!

I discovered the reason for his fatigue attached to his stall door: he had been busy winning ribbons in jumping events the day before!

I got to spend a four-day weekend with my collie friend, Mr. Gorgeous!

His winter coat hasn't grown all the way in yet, but his summer haircut has grown out enough that he looks very handsome once again!

He spent some of his time keeping an eye on the squirrels...

...but he spent most of it sleeping. Mr. Gorgeous has developed some arthritis and it was bothering him during our inclement weather. He prefers to laze away the days now.

We HAVE had quite a bit of rain.
Nary a drop fell prior to the 11th, but it rained enough over the next 20 days to qualify as the 10th wettest October on record.

And wind, too, though this stiff breeze brought sunny skies with it.

As late October set in, leaves rapidly changed color everywhere, including the leaves of this ivy...

...the ones that fell into this pond...

...and leaves of this smokebush plant.

And October was ushered out at last with this gruesome grinner!

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Front and Center

If you're a seller on Etsy, getting an item featured on the front page of the website is considered a real feather in your cap, though your chances are somewhat better than they used to be when front page treasuries were changed less often. How it works is that every hour or so, a new treasury is selected by the powers that be at Etsy to grace the front page. That means that anyone who goes to www.etsy.com gets to see twelve of the sixteen items in the treasury and naturally that drives a lot of traffic toward the items displayed. I've had a great luck of being featured on the front page TWICE in the last couple of weeks!

This graph shows the number of times my listings were viewed each day.
Can you guess which days my items were on the front page?

20x30 Gray & White Capiz Shells

In the first instance, I didn't know my gray capiz shell photo had made it onto the front page until I was checking my shop stats at the end of June. That capiz shell photo had been popular all month: it was included in 20 different treasuries in June! But I noticed on June 27th there was a big spike in traffic to my shop and I also noticed that 194 of them had come from the Etsy home page. So I did a bit of sleuthing work and determined that a treasury from a few days before the 27th had made it onto the front page. My photo was in the fourth row, which usually isn't shown unless items in the first twelve slots are sold, so my image may not have been on the front page for the entire time the treasury was up there. Still, it was fun to realize that I had gotten some front page recognition!

8x10 Chess Pieces

Then, on July 9th, I went to check out how things were going in my shop, starting on the home page, as I usually do. It took a second to register, but there was my chess pieces photo in the treasury on the front page! I'd seen the treasury a few days before when it was first made and had liked it, but suddenly the fact that my photo was in the number one spot (the top left) mattered a lot! I was so pleased that I took a screen capture of the front page with my photo on it and I was rather giddy for the rest of the afternoon. It was quite fun to have seen it there on the front page myself, rather finding out about it later. Either because of being in the number one spot or simply the strength of the photo itself, 368 people clicked on it when it was on the front page. In the case of both photos, people who visited my front page photo then viewed about a hundred other listings or looked at my shop overall.

Being on the front page didn't end up creating any sales for me, but it was great free advertising! Five hundred and sixty-two people who may never have seen my work otherwise clicked on one of my photos and then many of them took a look at other items in my shop. While the chess pieces photo was up on the front page, five people added my shop to their favorites and 94 listings were added as favorites. That means my shop and my listings will always be in there in their "Favorites" section for them and other people to see! I haven't been investing much energy in my shop lately, so it was great to have this boost of attention at no expense--monetarily or in terms of energy--to myself!

Also, here are the listings I've put up since my last overview:

8x10 Flower with Raindrops

8x10 Pink Columbine Flowers

5x5 Rotary Dial Phone

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Buzz-worthy

A point-and-shoot shot of a bee on
a lavender plant.

In the last three years or so since I started photographing flowers, I've always taken a particular delight in snapping shots of bees at work. These photos never make it into the "fine art" folder, but for some reason I get a kick out of watching bees do what they do best. Also, they are important pollinators and I am pro-pollination. Add to all that the fact that I've never been stung by a bee and the love-fest is complete. I'm not into cute artificial bees (you know, as decor and all), but I do like to see the real thing at work and if I'm out with my camera, I'll definitely point it at them. This worked out fine with my point-and-shoot in macro mode--sometimes the bee shot wouldn't come out, but a lot of times they did, at least well enough to put in one of my personal albums devoted to summer photos.

This underwhelming image was the best photo I got out of
 all my attempts to capture the bees on the rhododendron.

When I got my DSLR camera and my macro lens, I found the shallow depth of field to be a real problem when it came to photographing bees. My point-and-shoot's macro setting had an adequately broad depth of field that, so as long as the bee stayed more or less in the same place while I pressed shutter button, there was a decent chance the bee would be in focus. With my macro lens, and especially with my need to use the camera's autofocus feature because of my hand tremor, focusing on the bee became a problem. The autofocus feature chooses the point on an object that is closest to the lens as the area of focus and while there are ways of circumventing this feature, it's not so easy to do this when your subject is moving! And if the bee has entered a tubular shaped flower whose petals extend beyond the bee's body, forget about it! I spent days stalking the scores of bees that visited a large rhododendron in my yard and all I got for my trouble was a bunch of out-of-focus bee pictures. The lens either couldn't focus on the bee within the flower because of the autofocus limitations or couldn't refocus fast enough when the bee came buzzing back out. Since I just photograph bees for fun, I wasn't going to take the trouble to set up a tripod, point my camera at a flower, establish my focus ahead of time in manual mode, and then wait until a bee blundered into my setup!

Recently, though, I had a stroke of luck. I managed to find two different flowers on two different days being thoroughly explored by bees in adequate light!

The allium photos, which I'm displaying first, were actually the second set of photos I captured. (I'm saving the best for last.) I had tagged along on an errand to a local nursery specifically so I could photograph their alliums and found them crawling with bees. Because the myriad tiny allium flowers come together to form a solid ball, the bee stays on the surface of the flower and is therefore the closest thing to the lens, allowing me to use the autofocus mode to highlight the bee. Because so many little flowers make up the allium balls, if a bee moved, it seldom moved very far! That meant I had plenty of opportunities! The three below are the best and give a nice view of bees at work.

This next set of photographs were made possible thanks to the anatomy of the cornflower. The flower is in fact composed of many florets and the bee was slowly and carefully probing every single one, moving only millimeters at a time. This meant I had ample time to take picture after picture. One of the outer, ray-like florets was missing, giving my lens a clear shot of the bee as it moved over the surface of the flower. I love these photos because the macro magnification brings the details of the bee to life: the jointed exoskeleton, the bristling hairs, the intricate wings, all set against the gorgeous pinks and purples of the cornflower.

You can find more photographs of the cornflower and the bee here.

I love macro photography because it allows you to see the world around you in new ways. I've photographed all manner of flowers and plants and food and inanimate objects, but this is the first time I've been able to use it to reveal the unexpected wonder of a tiny animal. (Well, I had a delightful time photographing the shrew-mole, but the details revealed weren't nearly as amazing as those seen on this ordinary bee.) I feel very lucky to have seen the bee on the cornflower while I had my camera in hand! I stopped by that same flowerbed today, less than a week later, and found that the cornflowers are done for the year. I'm thankful, too, that I decided to invest in a 100mm macro lens, enabling me to take breathtakingly beautiful, unexpected photos!

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