287 Otto

Here’s Otto, captelaine’s lucky draw dog portrait.

It was a bit of a struggle doing this one. I’m going through a bad patch with my art at the moment, and doing a lucky prize painting would perhaps be a way of getting me out of the art doldrums. I needed some motivation and direction so I decided to fall back to what I love doing, namely portraits of people and pets.

So I’ll share my struggles so you can see how I puddle around trying to make something that looks like a dog painting. I started this on top of a failed watercolour with a coating of gesso over.

Next I defined a few features with black ink, then a bit of watercolour.

Watercolour wasn’t working too well on this surface so I started adding gouache. Being thicker and drier gouache seemed to be a better choice. I was unsure about the background, scrubbing different colours around at this point.

Otto wasn’t looking too bad at this stage but the background was still giving me a headache. This is where I put the two images side by side to try to work outside where I’m going wrong.

I gave up at this stage, ready to bin the lot and give up painting forever, and went off to bed in disgust.

In the morning I took another look at it and decided it might work with a different background. Otto seems like a gutsy type of dog needing a strong background so I painted over the lot with burnt sienna gouache.

I think it suits him much better. I hope you like him Elaine 😊

Now, I might take a break from painting for a while and go and do some gardening or something……. or I might not 😂

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