Luna
I did this portrait by request from a friend of a rather fun, adventurous dog named Luna. I don’t know much about her beyond what I can infer from the photo references, though, so we can only speculate about what kinds of adventures she may get up to.
As for the painting, I didn’t go into this with much of a clear plan. I hadn’t even settled on a single reference. I had this idea that maybe I’d do a main body shot with a couple partial head shots floating behind, like high school class photos. After sketching two, I found I wasn’t liking any composition that involved both. I hid one and tried giving the background a green flavor and wound up with this cool watercolor motif. I continued that theme, applying successive washes to build up the values and forms and things started looking pretty cool. I left the underlying pencil sketch enabled — it’s faint but you can still see parts of it. I also made a bounding ink layer, which I often find helpful for watercolor compositions.
There’s an intriguing rustic-ness to the piece I really dig. And the way the lighting contrasts with the dark background makes it pop. The watercolors let a little of that green swoosh through, unifying the whole. I think this painting works! I’m actually kind of excited about it!
Medium: Digital
App: Artstudio Pro
Tools: Watercolor, pencil, ink