Lyra’s perfect day

Lyra and Aftyn have been a team for a long time. I decided some time ago I wanted to do a portrait of them together. The concept is: what would make for an ideal day for a happy dog? Relaxing and playing with her favorite person.

I found the reference for the image on the left, with those great smiles, on Snapchat. The middle section, with the game of frisbee, is from imagination, which means it’s an agglomeration of a bunch of unrelated references guided by a howling sense of “that looks wrong!” The image on the right is from a reference I got recently. I’d bet it’s pretty old.

Initially I had this ridiculous thought I would use the same sun as the source of lighting for each image. Not only did that make the images look worse, nobody was ever going to guess I’d done it. Now the sun is moving across the frame as time passes, which is kind of cool in its own way.

I’m glad the two right frames keep a lot of the painterly quality. I get a little blend heavy when hunting for likeness, such as in the left frame, but that instinct didn’t kick in too badly on the others. I’m happiest with the lighting on the right (riverbed) panel. Getting the right amount of detail in the shadowed areas was an interesting challenge.

I had a lot of anxiety about drawing Aftyn from imagination in the second panel. I still don’t like looking at it, but I think it works well enough for the amount of space it takes. At least it doesn’t look terribly out of place next to the better referenced parts of the composition. I hope I’ve done them both justice.