I worked on Kato’s portrait just last week. I really loved painting his portrait, what a beautiful dog and the reference photo worked so well. It was a smaller square painting 25 x 25 cm in size. I decided to stretch the canvas myself as I can never get a pre-made canvas of that size. I do enjoy preparing everything from scratch. It gives the work a personal touch and gives me a chance to prepare for the creative process.
The painting was commissioned by a client in Cork. She wanted to give this painting to her partner as a gift. Kato sadly passed away recently and she wanted her partner to have something special to remember him by.
I worked with acrylics on stretched canvas as usual. Firstly, I created a line sketch with some yellow ochre mixed with small amounts of titanium white. I then added some basic colour blocks.
I worked in layers of paint, overlapping shapes to create volume on Kato’s fur. His fur is very curly and voluminous him being a poodle and I wanted to capture this not by painting every single hair but by creating an illusion of it.
The client was delighted with the finished painting and sent me a lovely email:
Oh my god Ivana! That is fantastic. You are truly gifted. Thank you so much!!
Natasja, Cork, Ireland
I took some photos of the finished painting in my studio. The Ikea shelf is working really well for photographing work 🙂
I work on thin edge canvas, 18 mm deep.
I took a photograph of the back of the canvas too to give you all an idea of how they look.
I always add some promotional materials when posting portraits. These would include a couple of business cards and a thank you leaflet. The thank you leaflet includes some care instruction for your artwork. For paintings, I would attach a tag with my details to the back of the wooden support.
