I recently worked on this lovely painting of Sam, a lovely collie dog with a backdrop of the Donegal mountains. The portrait was commissioned as a Christmas present for the client’s partner and Sam’s owner. Sam is no longer with us and I wanted to capture his lovely nature in the painting. He was a rescue dog and his owners were very fond of him.

I was given lots of reference photographs for Sam’s portrait so I had a lot to work from. One of the photos was of Sam in the Donegal mountains, and I thought it would make a really lovely background. The painting was 50 x 60 cm in size and painted with acrylics on stretched canvas. There was some fog coming over the mountains in the background and I decided to keep the painting quite soft to work with that. I am including a detailed view of the painting which I scanned and pieced together. Below are some work in progress images of the painting and a reference photo.