Pet Portraits

1. Introduction: If you've ever dreamed about sketching dogs and cats, maybe your own sweetie pie Labrador retriever, or maybe your best friend's little muffin, the new kitten. Or maybe you want to take commissions and draw animals for clients. Hi, my name is Mary Jane Muir. I'm an illustrator, a graphic artist and designer with over 30 years of experience. I've illustrated picture books, learning materials for children and youth, created banners for churches, and made posters for companies and advertising brochures. And some of my designs have been chosen for charity cards and even a Unicef hallmark contest winner. So now I'm going to show you how to make some pet zone Colored Paper. And I thought I'd share this with you so that you could try it too. I hope you have FUN. I hope it's, it's a good class. And now I think it is. So thanks for being here and let's get started. 2. The Project & Materials: Here is the Project for the class. Choose a photo to work from or use a photo provided in the class resources file. Then sketch with a pencil onto paper. And scan your sketch into Photoshop. Then print your pencil sketch onto coloured card. Set up your printer for photo printing. And it should be able to handle the card that you'll put through your printer. Once it's printed, fill it in with color and details with Colored Pencils. Following my video. To help you see how to lay down layers of colour. When you're finished. Take a photo of your project and post it here as a JPEG file and share it with the class. All you have to do is click create, project and upload it. We would love to see your work. I would love to see your work. He says the materials you'll need, find F photograph of your favorite pet. Or you can use my reference photo that I'll provide with the class. A sketch book would be good to have for sketching your animal. Or you could sketch on a piece of drawing paper or just plain photocopy paper. A pencil, of course. Maybe a two or three, be an eraser and a pencil sharpener and your photo. And then I used Strathmore tone blue mixed media paper. It's a very solid piece of paper. I think it'll be more archival then the card stock that I use to draw some of my first drawings on before I realized that perhaps that paper will fade. The card stock paper will fade, and that's not a good idea to do Fine Art drawing on that. Now, what I've got my pencils out there, Wax-based pencils, they're Prismacolor pencils. I doesn't matter what kind of pencil brand you use there except ACO row wouldn't be as good for this unless you were working on watercolor paper. If you're working on watercolor paper, then aqua real water based pencils would be great and you'll be using a paintbrush in water. But this one, I'm using Wax-based Colored Pencils and unmatched as many of the colours to the photo is, I could. Now we'll move on to the next step. 3. Drawing Your Subject from a Photo: I took a photo reference to use for this portrait. This a little dog has a one brown eye and one blue eye. I think he may be blind in one eye. So it it was a little bit of a challenge. I wasn't sure how he's going to do it. The photograph was on that grades, but it's what my friend sent to me and I thought it was good enough for giving it a good try. I'm drawing by eye with my three be pencil. I use the 3D because it was sharpen, it was close to me. I could've used an HB to draw this. This drawing is just to feel out the shape of the dog. I could see a circle of his skull and the circle around his muzzle. And there's the nose which is an oval shape. And I was feeling it out with my pencil. It was like I'm looking at the photograph and with my pencil, I'm drawing what I see. Now, what I'm seeing. I'm not putting it down exactly because I am human being and I have another grade of copying something exactly the way it looks. If you wanted an exact image of your creature or your pet, or where whatever animal you're drawing. You could take a photograph, enlarge it with Photoshop printed out on some good photocopy paper or just plain copy paper. And then put it up on a window and put a sheet of drawing paper over top of it from your sketchbook, or just a piece of paper from your printer, a piece of white paper. Trace the photo so that you get the exact shape of the skull and the nozzle, the muzzle and the nose, and the eye. For me, I was just eyeing it. So you can tell as I go along that it's not going to be an exact likeness of the dog. But I thought it would be a good idea just to show you what can happen when you draw from your eye because you may not get exactly what you're looking at. And perhaps it's not that important to have an exact likeness. Perhaps what you're just trying to draw is the animal. It's itself just to draw a dog with these features. And it's a good practice to draw by eye. And when I was drawing, I was looking closely at the photograph and feeling the shapes of the eyeballs and they here with my pencil, I seem to coordinate my I and my hand and my pencil when I'm drawing. I imagine this comes with time of drawing a lot. You just feeling it out and looking at the shapes very closely to see what I'm working with. The eyes are to round eyeballs it within, around sockets. The hair flows out in different directions from the center of the nose. If you can see the hairs fly out in different directions. Anyway. This is the process I did for drawing this dog. I'm going to provide it as a resource drawing if you want to use it for the project. So then we're going to move on to the next part of the project. After I've got this loose drawing, I'm going to scan it into Photoshop. And then we'll move on to the next step. 4. Printing on to Colored Paper: Before I scanned my drawing, I cleaned him up a little bit with an eraser. You could clean them up in Photoshop as well. But this saved a step on the computer. It was fine when I scan it in a book like this in Photoshop. Then I got my Strathmore coloured card and cut it to fit eight-and-a-half by 11 so that it would go through my printer so that I could put my pencil drawing onto this paper. I ordered my computer to print this on photo paper so that I could use the photo setup so that I could put the card through the back of the printer where it takes photo paper. I every printer is different, so I'm not sure what you have, but that's what it looks like when it was printed out. And I realize I can print as many as I want because I have the drawing now and I can put him on any color I want. And I can use them as a base for the drawing. So now it's time to fill in with the color 5. Tips for Using Colored Pencils: For this project, I use my pencil, crayons. I use Prismacolor colored pencils. I tried to match my pencils to the colours in the photograph. I used a lot of white and a lot of indigo blue, which replaces black for me. It, I prefer to use indigo and reds to get a dark black color over a plain black pencil. It's just my preference. And these are the colors that I used as I develop the drawing or this class. I have a lot of other colors to choose from, but these are the ones I use for the project. And I'd like to talk about sharpen your pencils. I like to work with very sharp edges. Sharp pencils. It's kind of hard to get a pencil, coloured pencil Crayon, really sharp. They're wax based. If you use a knife, they have a tendency to break. The wax. Color will often break off and it's a bit of a pain. So if you use pencil sharpener gently and carefully, that should work. Sometimes the, the, there will still break off, but you just have to be patient. If you have a lot of problems with breaking LEDS, it's not lead, it's wax. You can put them in the oven for a book 15 min at a very low temperature and warm them up in the lead, the wax will melt inside and join up and they won't break as frequently as before. I did this with some very old pencil crayons recently and it worked. I found out through Google how to do it. Now you want to keep your pencils sharp. I find it sandpaper can help keep them sharp, or just do what I'm doing here, or rubbing them against the paper to get the edges sharp 6. Adding Color 1: I thought it might be good idea to start drawing the dog or coloring the dog with the eye. And I use the yellow because I could see yellow in the eye in the photograph. You can also see some browns and some black. And I think the I is a rather delicate thing to fill in with color. So I don't know how to explain it. I think you have to practice if you is before you get them right. I always try to put a few colours in and I very careful with the eye, if you get it right, it has life to it. So playing with the colors that I see and just working light to dark. I started working with the eyes. I'm speeding this up. Here was much slower than this. And I did a lot of pencil sharpening and thinking. As I worked on these eyes, I added all piece of that gray papers, so I used it to test out my pencils and I realized that Pencils of black pencil, and they didn't want to use the black. I wanted to use my indigo blue because I prefer that. When I'm working with my pencil Crayon on something like this, you can get nice blacks, but you can work them up from the blue and put different layers on until you get a nice dark black. So sharpening the Pencils. Thinking about the I working on the I, I should have put a piece of paper underneath my hand because I probably got my hand probably touch the paper and fortunately they're very clean, so I didn't have any bad effects, but it's really good to work with really clean hands when you're doing this kind of work. And it's a good idea to put something under your hand to protect the paper underneath, which I didn't do. But nothing's perfect. The other in this job is blue and a very strange blue. And I didn't really get a good look at the eyes because any photographs she sent me, some of them may couldn't even see the eyes at all. But what I is definitely blue. The other one is brown. For the stock may be blind in one eye or maybe not. In any case, these are rather unusual fellow, much loved by his family. I don't know what his name is, but he's a sweet boy. You can just tell. So the I started to have some life to it. When the eyes start working out. Well then it gives me encouragement to continue to work on it. Because it's coming it's coming alive. And it may not look exactly like the photograph, but I'm going to continue regardless until I'm finished sharpening my pencils, figuring out which colors to use, just playing it by year and then starting to work on the hair. So I think I'll move on to continuing the coloring process in the next part of the lesson. How is observing the hair on the dog? Han, how it grows out from that center down the center of his nose. And what a mixture it is of white and blues. So onto the next part 7. Adding Color 2: I found a piece of card, or perhaps it's an envelope to protect my paper from any oil or material that might come off of my hand. Although my hands are really clean, as I said, it's really important to keep your hands very clean when you're working on drawings, especially coloured pencil or pastel or watercolor. I was looking at the hair and the direction in which it was growing around the muzzle. And I was using my white pencil, which was a more outstanding than that soft blue that I started with. But I'm glad I put the blue down because I have the choice. And I'm using the white very lightly because I have a plan to push down and make it more intense as I build this drawing. Years ago, I illustrated a children's book using pencil crayons. And when I was doing it, I came across a book by bet Board, Borgesian bet capital B 0 R G E SON. And she has had a book out called coloured drawing workshop. I'm not sure if it's still available, but there are a lot of interesting material and information about how to use coloured pencils and how to put colours in layers over your colors to develop your drawings. So I know that influenced me greatly in those years. And then later on I did a number of Pet Portraits. And during that process, I found another book called a realistic Pet Portraits in coloured pencil by a woman named Anne DeMille flood. And her book is about using photographs, tracing the images, and developing Portraits from the photographs. So I have been influenced by her as well. Hers are very controlled and very graphic, and I'm really fond of them. But I seem to have a different kind of off the wall style. I guess everyone's different. But I recommend that you find books about coloured pencils and working with them. If you're interested in working with colored pencils, they last a long time, they're not that expensive. You can buy them individually. And when you work on colored paper background like this, I find it's quite fascinating for Pet Portraits. I've speeded this up quite a bit because it's so long process. It took me quite a well, I think I have this going 400 times four times, four times normal. But I thought it would help. But you can see how I'm working with my pencil, building up layers. And then I went into the nose and I was following the photograph. And of course, by drawing wasn't perfect. No drawing is ever perfect. Perhaps if I had traced the head, I would have a more accurate shape of the actual Dog. A little bit off the muzzle isn't quite as square on my drawing as it is on the photograph. But I was quite happy with this little dog, whoever he is who is approaching, who came out of the paper. That's a funny thing about working with pencil crayons. In drawing an animal. It comes out of the paper as you work on it. I suppose it's like a sculptor working with rock or what do they work on? A marble or a rock, carving something out of stone. It's like bringing something up alive out of the paper. He's a sweet little Dog. I could just feel his personality as I was doing them. I do like Animals. I have a little Shih Tzu named Daisy. She is ten months old. She's a beautiful puppy. My other dog, Maggie, died in November. And I loved her dearly to and she was a **** too. And they have a lot of hair. But I've never tried to draw her. I've taken lots of photographs, but perhaps I'll give it a try. I just woke her up. She's sleeping so nicely while I was doing this. So you can see how I was building up the ear hair and the dog face. And I always think as I went along, Should I put in that red background? I think he was on a life jacket on a sailboat and I'm not sure what that red thing is, but it looks like he was wrapped up in it and maybe, maybe not. Maybe but I was just debating whether I should put that in because I liked the head along with nothing more. But as I worked on it, I decided to give it a try and go ahead and add the red background. And that will come in the next and last video of this project. I suggest you could speed this up even faster on your computer, on the screen, I think there's a way to speed up or slow down your video if you want to take now, that jump is when I went back to normal time, that's the actual time as I was working on it. It was fairly slow and steady. It's very relaxing to get into the zone to draw in this way. And I kept on building up the weight. I think it was time to move on to other things. Now, I added more dark using my indigo blue pencil. I find it's pencil is very popular because whenever I go to buy it, they're usually out of it. So it's hard to get. Although I suppose I could just order it online and and by a pencil on line, I'm not sure if people do that very often, just by one pencil. I love the indigo blue and how it goes down better than black. And it can look black if you put read over it. But I was kinda glad the photograph had a lot of blue in it because I love blue. And so we're almost finished this part and then I'll start on the red part in the next session. So hang on. Here, we can 8. Adding Color 3: And so we continue with the indigo pencil, my trusty indigo blue pencil. I was thinking a lot at this point and waving my pencil around in the air a lot as I was trying to figure out where to put the color thereof, speed adapt to pull it along because this was a long process. It took lock a lot longer than this video because I've speeded it up, but it's really worth the effort. Let me tell you. It's really worth the effort. I know we like to do things fast and with iPads and digital Art, we can do things really fast. And with AI, we can now do anything we want without too much effort at all. But there's always the joy of working with your hands to create something of your own hands from your own hands. I hope that we don't lose the pleasure and the respect for that. It takes a lot of practice to get results. I'm not claiming to be a great portrait artist, but I did want to share with you what I learned doing this a few years ago, around all both ten years ago. I thought I would do Pet Portraits and earn some money. Well, I'm not very good at marketing, but I did end up doing some Pet Portraits for a church to raise money. I did them for free and people bid to buy them. And then I did Portraits of these dogs. And I did some of our family dogs to with pencil, crayon, and watercolor. And they were, okay. I was quite pleased with them. But since I'm not really good at marketing, nothing ever came of it. And I became involved and other things and working another project and working with children. And so I got away from the dog portrait thing. But this Christmas, my dog had just died last while. She died in November and I was heartbroken. And I have some friends who realized that I needed to get another dog because in unwanted another dog, some people deal with loss in different ways. But I was so sad because I lost my darling little sheets Sue. So I have some friends and they got together and they helped me by this beautiful little **** CSU puppy. Her name is Daisy, as I mentioned before. And in return, I promise them that I would make Portraits of their pet. So they all send me Portraits of their Animals, little photographs. They weren't great photographs that they've taken with their iPhones over the last few years of their cats and dogs. And so I started doing these portrait. And I know I'm looking at 1234567 Portraits in a row that I have completed of their dogs and cats using my pencil crayons. I started out with watercolor and I despaired. I didn't like the results I was getting. They weren't bad. They were okay. But I love pencil Crayon. I love the control I have with withholding it in my hand, in the pencil, perhaps it's the pencil. I've always liked pencil crayons, so that's why I am doing this project. I thought, well, I could do a Skillshare class because this little dog is looking pretty good. And I could do a Skillshare class. I filmed it while I was doing it, and now we have it here. Now, the thing is, I was starting to think about adding the red background, which is the red in the photograph. So I thought okay, I'll go for it. There was no going back once I did that. So I started working some of the red. I was just playing with it, making it into some kind of a pattern of red. I thought that the red against the white will pull the dog's head forward and then it would pop a bit from the the paper and I think it did in a way. So I just worked with some warm reds and some cool reds. I think I used a cool red and then some more mad and mix them all up and added this texture. I'm hoping my friends would like to dogs and cats that I've drawn for them. I'm going to put them in the mail and then going to make a website and put my dog Portraits and can't Portraits up there too. Because I think I'm onto something FUN. Meaning this will help them with you if you try this. I know this isn't a perfect image. And I know that if you trace the photograph, you'll get a more, a closer image. They exact shapes of N spacing of the eyes and nose. And that's probably a way a lot of people might go. If you want a really good likeness and you're doing it for a client, they certainly want the Art to look like they're animal and they probably don't care if used a photograph or trace, trace to photograph. He's a pretty cute little dog. I didn't know if he turn out or not. But here he is. In all his laws, his nose is little off-center, his muscles a little off center. I know there are problems with it. But isn't that the way with everything? And doesn't that make on piece of Art special inhibits just a little wonky. It, it makes it more personal and less perfect and more human. I think I captured a character. I'm not sure if he is the character I captured seen a lot of dogs and that blue I I have to ask the owner about that blue. I I don't know if it was an injury or he must have been born that way. And I wonder if his blind in that, I have no idea. But he's pretty cute. So we'll just add some more finishing touches in another video to come. I added more Touches, so we're done with this part onto the next 9. Finishing Up with Final Touches: Because this is such a long process, I have continued to speed up the video so that you don't have to sit for so long to watch the process of the pencil against the paper. I will include a resource sheets for you in this project. And you can work from this particular photo if you'd like, or I would suggest you find a photo of your own animal or a friend's animal and give it a try and perhaps trace the actual image because then you'll get a closer match to your character. So I will also include a list of the coloured pencils that I used for the Project. And Alyssa of the papers you might use. This is the stage where I added a lot more detail. I lightened to lights and dark and the darks. And I was thinking about the red and whether or not to add the clip and the strap in the drawing. So as I was working on this, I was thinking about it. And I was almost wishing I hadn't added the red at this point because I think this drawing stood on its own without the background. But there's no going back. I'll let it go and I'll make it as good as I can make this. And I can always try again because I have the drawing and I can print it out on a different colored paper, for example. The good thing about printing the drawing owed is that the line won't be seen once you color it in. And you can also repeat many times your drawing, original drawing and printed out on different colored paper in case one doesn't work out the way you wanted, or if you want to try it on a different color, you can print on other coloured papers. Even wait, if you cut a sheet of hot press, you could find that on white hot press paper, your coloured pencils will work quite well. I like working with colored pencil on hot press. Or you could make a watercolor of your drawing for our painting. So you can see I'm darkening dark areas, trying to make shadows and and trying to make things. Well, actually I'm following the photograph and seeing where the shadows are, bringing the dog's head a little bit forward, trying different colors, adding this in that part of the process. And I didn't work this fast, of course. And I had nice music on. I was relaxed and I wasn't frantic. It's a very peaceful process to do drawing like this. I add it's more weight to the eyes, a little bit more weight to the nose. Some highlight, some shadows, some dark spots, some light spots. And I was realizing that the area around the muzzle isn't exactly like the photograph, but it worked okay for me. So I thought should I add the strap? Well, I added the strap and I added the buckle. And in the end, I wish that I hadn't. However, there was no going back once I started. So I've filled in the color and made strap work. He'd had a little bit of a pattern on it. There was a fold on the strap and there was pattern material and it was a bit thick. A nice little strap. I'm not sure what it was for. Perhaps it's a life jacket. I don't know. Then I tackled this clip, which is a little bit complicated, but I just drew it right there with my indigo blue pencil. At this stage of you are trying to draw something like that. You might use an HB pencil or a, and then you could Erebos the lines that didn't work. On the other hand, nil, maybe just go straight out at with your coloured pencils because you don't want to make a mess. Yeah, you have to make decisions at the end. Summer goods, some are bad, but I was just trying to make that a little strap look the way it looked. It's a rather unusual shape. But I have a Dog color for my little dog and there's a strap like similar on her harnessed. So they are a little bit strange. But they clip and hold this the harness against the dog's body. But as I say, I wish I hadn't put it there. It's a bit distracting. But once I did it, it was there. So I had a little bit of texture to give that sense of being a strap and some edges to the clip. For the plastic part. It was almost done. And I'll give some final thoughts in the last the two, well, the next video. Thanks for watching so far. I hope you can see your Animals When you're finished. Final Thoughts coming up next? 10. Final Thoughts : Thank you for taking this class. I hope you enjoyed it. Post your Art down below to share with the class your projects. And also if you want to take my other classes, I have for other classes on Skillshare, which are completely different from this one. But you might enjoy the creative process. Create a process can lead to things that are marketable and helpful and prove your creativity and your, your life. Hey, you're Art life, your artistic practice. So thank you so much for being here. I really hope you enjoyed my class I and a lot of PFK-1 and I learned a lot putting this together. Thanks so much