Portrait for Dedee

A new commission is a huge adventure. First to meet the animal, and then the animal's people is to enter a new world. When I do a portrait, several channels open, some inner some outer. I always try to work from my own photos when possible. I know the moment I get the "right" picture, something clicks inside me when the shutter clicks, like my mind and heart lock in to a particular feeling. That feeling will be my guide for the rest of the process. This section of the blog will track a portrait from start to finish. The glowingly beautiful subject is a Brittany Spaniel of gracious and sweet presence. Her people Pam and John found me via a Paws for Art auction, a yearly fundraiser for our local animal shelter. It's a wonderful event where art created by the animals (they mostly follow the abstract expressionist schools of art!) is sold along with the 2 legged artist works.
This post will cover day one.
I had a whole day set aside to start, facing the blank board should be totally inviting, I admit I find it intimidating every time, no matter how many I do. So the day passed and I found 20 other things to take care of and didn't manage to start until 10 PM that night. I really don't like drawing and I'm not very good at it, in spite of years of practice, so I use any trick I can find to get the beginning drawing down, a projector is often useful. That said, if you don't know your anatomy, and haven't done a lot of drawing( even if its a chore) and you don't know how the camera distorts things, you will be in big trouble just trying to trace off a photo. Since I work in layers of color my original drawing gets covered up anyway. So I carefully draw or trace off the main items of eyes and nose and some key locating points, in case I get too far off and have to redraw areas.

I have a main photo for the composition, I also have 15 other photos as reference. The big challenge of this work will be the light key. That means the whole work is very light. On a value scale of 1 to 10 with 1 being white, most of the painting is value 1-3. I will have to make a lot of adjustments, and add darker values underneath to make this work. I will be teetering on the brink a lot, I know this before I start, so right away I will compensate. My guiding light for whites is Mary Cassatt, she is a master, and her style of impressionism is strong in structure. She also has the gift of creating moods from everyday life. I love this, and I hope to do the same with my animal portraits. Long after you and I and our animals are gone, art will still be here. I would love it if someone 50 years from now would look at the portrait of Dedee and feel the grace and dignity, and see in the art, the loving home she lived in.
So here is the beginning drawing on Ampersand Pastelbord, 16x20 sand tone
I will look for darks, lights and some of the color patches. This took about 20 min.
Next I strengthen the drawing adding more charchol in the darks, charchol is easily dusted out and built up, I'm not ready to commit yet. When I am I'll use black pastel pencils in the darks