This commission was a compilation of photographs and ideas that a client contacted me with a couple of months ago. His idea was for me to create a portrait of his two dogs, beautiful basset hounds, with a cherry blossom tree in the background. He also wanted some butterflies in the drawing. I researched images of these online and found some the dogs can each be looking at in flight. This turned out to work quite well.
As usual with these types of commissions, I created a digital mock-up in Photoshop to give the client and idea of how the drawing would work. It turned out quite well at the end, the client thought:
Hi Ivana! It looks brilliant, thanks so much. Can’t believe how good it turned out…
David, Rathangan, county Kildare, Ireland
It was quite a time consuming project, with all the detail and individual components in the drawing. I worked on a line sketch first and moved on to shading once happy. I must say, the most enjoyable was drawing the dogs’ eyes and noses. I love basset hounds, their expressions so sad looking and full of character.
I had to make the cherry blossom a little smaller to capture it in its entirety, but with the angle of the dogs’ photo, the perspective worked well. The drawing is 40 x 30 cm, A3 similar size. I worked on Fabriano 5 paper with graphite and charcoal pencils.