Remembering a Furry Friend

May 16

Painting a Watercolor Dog Portrait

When we adopted our dog two years ago, I fell in love. Not just with our dog, Milo, but with ALL dogs. I don’t know how this happened. It’s as if Milo opened a portal in my heart and now I love dogs. It’s as simple as that.

So when a client asked me to paint a pet portrait of his beloved family dog, Lilly, who had passed away, I was all in. Here she is:

an elderly black dog with brown eyes, white whiskers, and soft floppy ears. — *My client’s beloved family dog, Lilly.*

First, the sketch

My first step was to create a digital sketch of Lilly from the photo. I wanted to be sure to get the eyes right, which is really difficult via hand-painting on 8”x10” watercolor paper. I decided to draw the eyes in Procreate, using the actual color of Lilly’s eyes as the color palette.

Next, I drew the outline of her body with teeny-tiny pencil strokes (Apple Pencil, Procreate Technical Pen brush) to create a rough outline that emulated her fur. This created the drawing I would paint on.

This process takes about an hour; here it the resulting linework drawing.

Painting the portrait

I have developed a process that works well for me, which I describe in detail in this post. I print my drawing on 100% cotton hot press watercolor paper using water resistant ink. Then, I paint directly onto the paper.

Painting animals with black fur is tricky. By squinting at the reference photo, I can see lighter areas and darker areas of her fur. Some areas are more bluish, and others more brownish. I used a combination of different colors to get this effect, including:

Payne’s Gray (a bluish-gray)
Burnt Umber
Ivory Black

*My watercolor portrait of Lilly, in progress on my painting table.*

I paint in layers, with an underpainting of darker tones, as pictured below. On top of that, I layer hundreds of tiny brush strokes to create a furry texture. This is very time consuming, but I really like the result.

*Painting dog fur by creating texture with many, many tiny brush strokes with a #4 round brush.*

The final illustration

I finished Lillys portrait with some whiskers in white paint (Ph. Martin ‘Bleedproof White’). I then added iridescent gold to her tag (Fintec ‘Arabic Gold’). The scanned version below doesn’t show iridescent paint well, but it’s visible in the original portrait I gave to my client.

Here is the final result: