It's a Beau - tiful Dog

A friend of mine asked me to paint a picture of his son's dog, Beau. He's a very regal Chesapeake Bay Retriver. Here's the finished watercolor that he gave to his son for Christmas.

Most of my dog portraits have been on Yupo paper which lets me get a lot of serendipitous texture in the coat, but with Beau I needed to achieve a softer finish so I use transparent watercolor on illustration board.

A RETRO FIT

I haven't had much time to paint this week, but I did pull up some of the previous references photos from Karin Jurick's blog and did some quick, loose studies. They are not near as finished as the pieces submitted to her site, but I just wanted to use these as some warm up practise. I haven't really done many watercolors lately so if I do try a more finished piece, I'll start again and lay down a better drawing first. I was mostly trying to work with tone values and composition, rather than details. There's a new challenge this week, so I'll work on that, as well as on some acrylic abstracts this week.