Watercolor Pet Portraits: German Shorthaired Pointer

1. Intro Pet Portrait Tutorials: Hello, and welcome. My name is Emily, and I am the artist behind Emily Marie Watercolors. Welcome to my home studio here in Madison, Wisconsin. In this tutorial, you'll learn how to paint Tilly, a German short haired pointer, using watercolors. As a watercolor artist, I have found a passion for painting pet portraits. If you already know the basics of watercolor, painting pet portraits can be a great way to turn your hobby into a part time or even full time career. My style is characterized by adding details to the mouth, nose, and eyes, but not getting caught up in painting every single hair or curl. Use the tracing template of Tilly included in this tutorial or choose your own reference photo to paint. You'll also have access to a color reference photo of Tilly, as well as all of the supplies and colors that I use in the tutorial. I'll break it down for you step by step. We'll look at painting our first few layers of brown fur, how to paint a modeled, speckled neckline. We'll also add black details, and at the end, we'll look into using white gouache to add some fine white details. As an added bonus, I've even included a quick guide with step by step pictures so that you have an easy way to see how all these layers come together. So grab your supplies, and let's get ready to paint. Don't forget to upload any questions that you have, and I'll try my best to answer them along the way. Let's get started. 2. Supplies and first layer of irises and nose: Alright, so I have my sketch all on my five by seven inch hot pressed watercolor paper, and I did tape it onto a plastic corrugated board. I used some Kiwi hub tape, and I also added some masking fluid using an old brush. Um, I use the same brush for masking fluid, so I don't have to really clean it off too well. And I added just a little bit of masking fluid in the highlights of both eyes. So this left eye here has just one highlight. It's the one rectangular highlight. And this right eye has two small rectangular highlights. I decided to add two small highlights, and then after I finish painting, I'm going to decide if I really want to keep both highlights. But when in doubt, always mask out more than what you need, you can always adjust it later on. Alright, so I have my reference photo on my computer, and I have the brightness of it completely up on my computer so that I can see all the nice highlights. And I'm ready to start painting Tilly, our German short haired pointer. So whenever I start pet portraits, I do like to start by painting the colored iris and then also any of the pinks that I notice in the face. And so I'm going to start with the irises. I'm starting off with my round size four brush. To be honest, I probably won't change and use a different size brush the entire tutorial. However, if you have a slightly smaller round size brush that you would like to use for details such as the eyes, nose and mouth, you are more than welcome to use a slightly smaller detail brush. Alright, so Tilly's eyes, um, are more yellowish in color. It has just a little bit of brown, like a maple brown around the edge. But I do want to start with that yellow color as my first layer, and then I'll try to drop in a little bit of extra color. I'm noticing just a hint of green and then a hint of kind of this maple color around the edge. This color that I'm using for the base color is an art philosophy color. This color is called sassafras, but it's very close to a gamboge, which is slightly more brown tones. So I will paint the entire iris. Using this yellow color. I'm going to do both at once. Now, from here, I want to drop in a little bit of color while this is still wet. So using whatever water is left on my brush, I'm going to grab first a little bit of this maple color. This maple is very similar to a quinacradon burnt orange if you don't have that at home, if you don't have maple at home. I'm gonna drop it into the edge, and I'm noticing that maple is really flying all over the place. So I'll tap my paper towel, get a little bit of that liquid off of my brush. If you're noticing that your color is going everywhere, it means you have too much liquid on your brush. You're reintroducing too much liquid. So I'm going to just lift. I'm going to use a dry brush to lift a little. And then I will use that yellow drop in that yellow again to push that maple to the edge. I'm also noticing just a little hint of green. So I'm using a little bit of sap green. I'm noticing that sap green closest to the pupil, though, so I'll just get ever so slight amount of this green and tap it near where the pupil is. And I'm going to let that dry. Now, remember that you can always dry your brush off and lift color if it got all over the place. If you're not happy with the color before it dries, press down, lift it up, and try over again. Now, the pinks here, we do have some pinks in the nose area. But because it's blended in so nicely with the brown, I think I actually want to add that pink when I'm adding my brown layer. So we're not going to do that pinks at this stage, but we will when we do the first layer of our nose. Alright, so while I give the eyes a little bit of time to dry, I'm going to jump on to the first layer of the nose. Now, normally, if there's a black nose, pup that you're working with, I would choose a gray. But any of our brown nosed pups, um, you actually are going to want to choose a brown. The brown that I am going to use for the majority of this painting is pyominiteGenuine. Um, this brown has more red tones to it, and it is a granulating color. So when you lay the color down or when you let it settle on your palette, you will notice those multiple colors separating, and so you will have to continue to mix it. But I do think that whatever sort of brown color that you have in your palette, if it's not warm enough of a brown, you can always add a little bit of red to your brown or a little bit of magenta, like a quinacrito magenta to your brown. So I do want a really light, transparent brown because I do want that lightest highlight of the nose, that center of the nose to be represented with this color. So I think that's a great color to start with. And I am keeping my magenta kind of in line in my mind because I do want to add that magenta towards the bottom V just below the nostrils. I'm going to drop it in while it's wet. Before I drop it in, though, I'm going to cover this whole nose with this first layer. I go back to where I started to make sure it's really nice and wet. And then without drying my brush or cleaning it, I'll grab a little bit of that magenta, and I am noticing there's more pinks under the nostrils. Now, obviously, that's a lot of pink. So I'm going to blend using a damp brush. Now, damp, not wet. That's important. If you use reintroduce more water at this point, all you're gonna do is you're gonna push the pigment away. So you want to be extra careful now that the pink is there, I'm working really fast to dry my brush. And then to lift a little bit, I'm using the edge of my brush and a dry a dry edge of my brush to lift from the end here, as much pigment as I can. And then I'm also gonna lift a little under the nostrils. I might lift in any other little areas where I see that there's a little bit of highlight. Now, I don't have to worry about getting every single highlight represented here. I just kind of want to get the lightest shades. 3. First Layer of Brown Fur: So we are now going to start on the first layer of brown for the face, particularly around the eyes and ears. Now, you might need a slightly different shade of brown than what I have for Tilly here. And we have two options here for our first layer. So we have kind of our warmer color that leans more red brown. That's our pyominite genuine. And then we have a cooler brown that leans kind of more yellow, and this is a sepia. So sepia is still going to be a light shade, so it's not going to be very, very dark in color, but we are wanting to just get color down. The only area that I'm going to avoid at this point is the muzzle area where it kind of turns to white. At this stage, we don't need to worry about leaving any sort of painting any sort of fur strokes. Because we're gonna leave those individual fur strokes for our second layer of color. Right now, we just want to get that first layer of color down and kind of get our bearings down for this portrait. Now you'll notice I'm going to do the ear first. And then I'm going to take a peek, if I notice any kind of red areas that are leaning more towards red. So maybe closer into the face is leaning a little bit more red. I'll go back. And now I'm gonna look around this left part of the face. Now, you do need to leave that paper color, that white of the paper for any place that is white. Um if there are little tiny hairs around the eyes, these little tiny white hairs around the eyes, I'm not going to keep that open. Those little tiny hairs I will not be representing in this painting. It's just too hard, too small of details. However, when I get up to the muzzle here, I do want to make sure that I'm keeping that clean. Now here around the eye, particularly, I do want to be careful. I'm going to switch to that more red. I might actually even drop in some pinks here as well. So here I've got too much color. I'm going to lift some of that around the eye area, and then I'm going to just grab a little bit of that quinacdomgenta, that pink. See if I can add a little bit of pink here. And I'm going to move on to this next side. So I'm trying to do this as quick as I can because, of course, this hot press paper dries quickly. It's one of the challenges of working with hot press. Now, on these seams where it already started to dry, you can kind of try to rework that seam, if you will. God. My biggest tip, though, is to try to plan out your painting so that you are stopping where you have a natural border. So I've got this natural border by the ears. I don't want to add too much space for me to paint at once. This is also why I'm working on five by seven. I might have to adjust it slightly if I were working a little bit larger, so I might have to paint in smaller sections if it was a larger piece. All right, so I'm going to try to do the same, drop in a little bit of pink around the eyes, trying to keep my brush, somewhat dry. I don't want to reintroduce too much water, or otherwise, it's going to push the pigment away. So I'm keeping my brush as dry as I can while still adding in that pigment. And then now, when I move on to this ear, I'm gonna be using more of that piaintte genuine because I am noticing more of those red undertones in that ear. If you are starting to paint this at home and you don't have time to drop in the pinks around the eyes, do not worry. That step you can always add after the browns are dry. I would though suggest drying your brush and lifting a highlight around the eye so that you have less brown pigment in that spot so you can drop in the pinks later on. Alright, so now from here, I'm going to take a peek at the nose area, and I do want to use the same browns that I have mixed on my plate on my palette, simply because I want to make sure that I'm connecting the two. Obviously, I'm going to be adding a lot more layers onto around the eyes and ears. I'm going to start, though, with using this piamintite genuine and coming around the bottom of the nose because that is where, of course, it is the darkest in color. And it's the most uniform. So I don't have any of this little texture around the edge. So all I'm doing right now is I'm taking a peek at where that kind of blob shape is around the base of the mouth, and it kind of extends a little bit along the base of the lip. I'm going to do it on the other side because I am working quite wet. If yours is drying too quickly here, you can stop and drop in your magenta before you do the other side. So this side, we've got a little bit of the bob coming down this way. Now this blob that I'm referring to is kind of where you see more of the pink in the mouth area. So I'm dropping in a little bit of that quinacridone magenta. Of course, it's looking pretty intense with quinacridone magenta right now. It will dry a little bit lighter. However, I can also wash my brush off and use it like a sponge to kind of soak up where maybe it got a little bit too intense in color or where it maybe got a little bit too dark. I know that this is gonna dry a little bit lighter, so I'm happy leaving it like that. And now I am going to use this sepia that's watered down, and I'm going to try to extend it to this upper section of the nose. So the above the nose here, we also have a little bit of a blob shape. It's kind of more rectangular. And then after this blob shape, it just kind of seeps into white. So while this is still wet, I'm gonna dry my brush, dab it so it's not soaking wet. And then using the tip of that wet brush, I'm going to come to that line, that edge. I think I got too much water off and just kind of extend that edge there. If needed, you can always drop in more pigment now that you've got that that edge of wetness. Now, I'm taking a peek at kind of the left hand side here where that sepia is a little bit darker in color. 4. Painting the cheeks and mouth: It is extending here. And then what I'm noticing then is that it's just a lot of little tiny lines. So here is where I kind of do want to add a few little hair details. This is where I'm kind of starting with some of these little hair details coming out from the nose. I'm using trying to use what pigment is already on my brush from this one line that I created here. And I'm making I'm barely touching the paper here. Kind of making these little almost like hash mark lines coming out of the edge here. It's gonna be thicker closest to the nose. These little blobs. And then once you come outside of the nose, I'm trying my best to make kind of random lines, but also checking out my reference photo and seeing where these are connected a little bit more. So it looks like there's some blobs here along the edge. I'm leaving some of that paper to shine through. That was a mistake. I'm understanding that I can always come back with water and blend some of these out. Once I come towards the center of the nose, now this areas already starting to dry. And so I can use this brown to add some of these little dots where the hair follicles are coming out. Oh, well, it's wet. I'm gonna grab a little bit more of that sepia directly from my pan, add it to where it's the darkest. Noticing it's dark out here. It's dark in here. And then, of course, it's the darkest around the edge of the nose. Then we do have a little bit more on this left hand side, as well. A this area of your painting is probably going to be the most challenging around the nose here. The rest of the painting has different texture. When you're done with those little lines, wash your brush and use a somewhat damp brush, tap it on your paper towel first. And then using that somewhat damp brush, you're going to go over that area that you just did all the little scuff up marks. I like to go over it with a little bit of water afterwards because I do feel like it then helps to blend it into the painting itself. Especially because, you know, we've got so much texture going on here that, yes, we want those individual hairs, but we don't want them to look too perfect. So when they look too perfect, they end up looking awkward in our painting. So sometimes adding a little bit of water and making it a little bit more fuzzy of a look sometimes helps overall. I still, though, want to leave some of that white shining through. So I'm trying my best to leave a little ring of white around the edge and to leave some white shining through here. Now, on this right hand side, it's definitely not as prominent, but we still want to add some of that texture because we don't want it to just fall flat then on this side. So where I'm noticing the darkest pigment is going to be now under this right hand side of the nose. So I'm starting there. I'm also coming down into this little line that goes towards the mouth. And now I'm noticing more shadow instead because of how the light is under this right lip. Gonna grab a little bit of water to lighten down that color. And then I'll come in on this side with that sepia. It's looking a little too dark. So I'll grab a little bit more water and add it directly to my brush. And now I'm going to try my best to kind of erase that little edge that I had made with the colorful blob here. Alright, now, the last thing that I'm going to do at this stage, I'm gonna grab a little bit more of that CBA. It's hard to tell, but I do know that this lip underneath is the same coloring as around the outside of this muzzle. And so I do want to add a little bit of color here. It could be that kind of medium sepia tone. There's a little bit of texture on the left hand side. It gets really nice and dark on the right. Now, because I'm using this hot press paper, it's already dry. So I don't have to worry about these two blending together. I am leaving a little bit of white along the bottom rim of the lip here because my German Shorthaired Pointer has so many little white hairs popping out. Then the lip that's connecting to the body there is going to be much lighter, much more of a rosy color. So I'm using that piainte genuine on that lip part. And it's actually going to be a little bit lighter than the rest of the brown around it. So after dropping in a little bit of that pink color, now I'm gonna dry my brush, and I'm gonna lift a little bit of a highlight just right there under where that lip should be. Now, if your colors still haven't dried in time, dried yet, you can always add a little bit more darker shadow here to the right. However, if it's already if it's already dry, you can wait for it to dry completely and add that at a next step. Okay. So I'm just adding a little bit of that more concentrated sepia along the outside edges there. 5. Second layer of Brown Fur: Alright, so before we start working on the body, it seems like the area above around the eyes and the ears are dry. And so I do want to add a second layer there. So I am going to use kind of where my palette is here, that a little bit of that sepia. I might have a little bit of that peaminite genuine kind of mixed in there as well, and that's okay. Um, so my second layer is going to need to be a little bit darker, more opaque and transparency than my first layer, but still not as dark as these darkest shadows here on the left hand side. I'm going to be doing at least three layers. A lot of times when painters are painting portraits, pet portraits, their second layer that they paint might be too dark. And when it's too dark, the contrast is too intense and your portraits tend to look a little bit more illustrative versus fine art. And so as you start painting your second layer here, if you are noticing that it is very much a stark contrast between the first layer, think about maybe adding a little bit more water to your second layer there. Alright, so with this second layer, most of the section of the ear here is actually going to be covered in this second layer because this left ear is so dark in color. The only section that I might keep out from that color is there's a little bit of highlight here in the ear. And so just at the little tip here, I might leave a little bit of that original color to shine through. But really this section of the ear is gonna be the darkest. And so I pretty much the entire ear is going to be covered with the second layer. I just lifted a little bit of highlight from there. Now, when we start painting the section of the head here, so there's a little almost, like, flap of the ear. So I'm gonna try my best to leave a little tiny bit of that first layer to shine through and just add a little sliver almost there to the ear. Now when I take a peek at painting the rest of the head here, I'm going to try my best to kind of keep some of these lighter areas shining through. Now this is where it can get a little bit challenging simply because you're needing to paint reverse style. Where am I seeing the lightest lights? I'm seeing them around the eyes, and I'm also noticing there's a lighter here in the middle. So I'm going to work a little bit on blending. Now, when I'm blending, I'm going to just grab a little bit of water, dab my brush. And now I can use a very, very light hand to come on into the center here, and that's how I kind of blend out the color into the center. Now here around the eye, I do have this darker kind of chunk around the eye here and it's coming all the way around. So from that dark chunk, I'm going to add a little bit of some little hairs coming out from that chunk here. Then on the inside, I'm going to try to do the same. I'm going to pull a few hair strokes. I think I can get this a little bit closer. The same with the bottom here is that you do have a little bit of this highlight under the eye. And then the rest of the area we're just gonna fill in with the sepia until we get to this kind of jawbone area where we can just try our best to leave a little sliver of that first layer. Try my brush, come along that edge and just lift up a little bit of that pigment along that hard inner edge. This darker sepia is coming in a little bit. And now I'm noticing some shadows here in the center of the face. So it's kind of a triangular shadow that kind of comes up. Now in the center of the face here of the forehead, it gets darker. This is where it can be a little bit challenging to paint all of the shadows that you see. So I'm gonna try my best to paint some of the larger shadows. I wet my brush, dab it on my paper towel, and now I'm using this damp brush to just kind of blend some of those edges. A grabbing a little bit more, mixing a little bit more of this sepia. Now, on this right hand side, we do have our main highlight. And so the area that we want shadow is you're noticing this line here on the inside of the eye. That's kind of where shadow is, and it's reaching from the bottom here of the nose, and it comes up along the eye, and then we've got this little darker eyebrow almost on top of the eye. And then we're also reminding ourselves that we've got that same light area around the eye. So I want to extend that highlight and blend the edges we've got a little bit of this kind of triangle underneath and a little line running down the edge of the face, blending those edges with a damp brush. Now, on this right ear, I'm mixing in the rest of that pyomintype genuine to kind of give it a little bit, a little bit more reddish of a hue. 6. Adding details in the eyes, nose and mouth: Alright, so we are now in the stage of a painting that I like to call and that a lot of other artists call the ugly Face. It's where your painting doesn't have enough details yet. It's looking off. It's got some interesting choice of hard edges, but we don't have enough detail yet. And so this is kind of the stage where a lot of artists tend to want to give up on their paintings. And so I like to tell people to just push through, see through it and see if you can, um add if by adding a few more details, if you can then start to see your final product kind of emerge. So what I would like to start on now at this stage is adding some details to the eyes, nose and mouth, just so that we can start to see our pet come alive instead of seeing all these blobs of color. So I'm using shadow violet. This is the gray that I like to use for all my pet portraits. I'm mixing it with some water, but I am doing a fairly opaque tone because I'm going to be going around the eyes here. And so I want to make sure, of course, that it's dry at first, but I'm going to start by outlining around my eye. Now, this is the part that if you wanted to switch just slightly smaller round size brush, you can do this round size zero. I'm going to start with this four and see what happens. I might switch part way. So with our German point short haired pointer, we're going to have this line around the iris. And it's going we're gonna have quite a thick shadow here on above the eye. And that thick shadow kind of runs into this kind of droopy center. So it kind of comes down and it wraps around. Now, the one thing with pointers is that there's a very, very thin line around the bottom of the eye. It's really a lot thicker around the top, and it kind of comes to a point here in the edge. The pupil in the center of the eye is going to be a little bit smaller because we do have our pointer facing the sun. And so the center of these eyes I did water down. I just grabbed a little drop of water. Just to make the center here a little bit lighter in color. I'm going to add a little darker of black in the very, very center, but this outer edge I do want to keep a little bit lighter in color. I'll do the same on this right eye. It also looks like I got this gray a little bit too flat. This gray needs to kind of get pushed up a little bit. So I'm gonna re wet the area, reactivate that gray because I don't want that gray. There anymore. I want that gray to be slightly raised up. So this is another good excuse for really adding quite a lot of water to your mixture because then if you do make mistakes, it's much more it's much easier to then lift those mistakes. So I think I'm just gonna kind of redo this whole section. So I lifted the area, dabbed it off. Now I'm gonna kind of let it dry a little bit. But I'm going to add the little highlight in the eye. Alright, and then I will go on. I'm gonna move on to the nose, then while I let this eye dry a little bit. I'm gonna start with that. Shadow violet and the nostrils. I'm gonna run the shadow violet down the center of the nose and also around the edge of the nose. So right now, basically, what you're noticing or maybe you're not noticing this at home. But when I take a peek now of this shadow violet, now I'm noticing just how different the shadow violet is from the rest of my painting, so from these browns here. And so I do want to bring some of that shadow violet into the rest of my painting so that it doesn't just kind of exist only in the eyes here. So I'm going to bring a little of this shadow violet into where those darkest areas of the face is here. I'm gonna really water it down. So I've got this sepia mixed with the shadow violet, and then I'm going to come in and add some shadows on this left side of the nose around the nostril here around the lower edge. And then I'm going to add a little bit of texture to the nose, so I'm gonna dab my brush to release some of that liquid and then add a little bit of texture by just dotting. I just want to keep kind of the center area open. And I'll also add some of that shadow violet to the mouth area. So here with the shadow violet, I do want to outline kind of on the under part of the upper lips. So instead of outlining the lips themselves, I'm going slightly underneath. I'm going to add a little hint of a line here to kind of outline that lower lip. And then I'll outline under this right cheek. And around under the chin here. Remembering that I'm kind of trying to keep that little edge of white here. All right. And before we continue on with more of the shadow violet, I do want to take a peek back at that eye and try to correct that eye a little bit. This is a really hard angle. I'm going to start with the inside, so around that iris on the inside of the eye. 7. Fixing the shape of the left eye: Right, so I want to take a break from the eyes, nose and mouth, especially from this eye. I'm getting slightly frustrated with that eye, which is fine. I think I'm going to correct the shape later on. Well, actually, you know what I'm going to correct it right now now that I'm noticing it. So I think the reason why it's looking off to me is because I think I cut the bottom of this round circle a little bit too much. I think I need to round it out a little bit. So I'm gonna clean my brush and then use a wet brush. I'm going to reactivate the edge at the bottom of this iris. And what I'm trying to do is I'm trying to extend that iris, make it a little bit more circular at the bottom there, see if that helps with the shape. The shape of yours at home, maybe, maybe you got on the first round, and that's awesome if you did. If you did not rewetting the area and just kind of scrubbing it out a little bit, letting it dry and then going back is a great way of kind of adjusting. 8. Painting the Speckled Neck: Alright, so we'll let that dry. We'll kind of leave it for a little bit while we calm down. A lot of times I'll have to do that as an artist. If there's a section that's bothering me, it's best to leave it and come back. And so we're going to work on the texture of the body. So this texture is going to be a similar texture as to what I use for kind of my curly hair dogs, and that's going to be more blobs. And we're going to do the blobs in two layers. So the first layer is going to be wet on dry. And I'm going to be using my shadow violet. I do want this shadow violet to be really liquidy. I want it to be about a medium opacity, so it's going to be around that opacity. And then I'm going to take a peek at where my sepia is and keep that in mind. So my sepia is right here. So our goal is to do our first layer. Um, I want to make these little blobs, but I do not want to use the tip of my brush, so I'm not having a perpendicular brush to my paper, or my blobs are going to look too tiny and too circular. I want to instead use the edge of my brush, and I'm going to be kind of dragging the edge of my brush. I'm making a little bit of a dotting motion while I pick up and kind of move my brush almost in circular shapes. And I want to keep quite a lot of pigment on my brush. I want it very loaded. And I'm going to kind of just almost brush along using this edge. It's almost completely parallel with my paper. That's how much of the edge I'm using. I'm not pressing down too hard, and I'm leaving some of the white of the paper to shine through. And kind of making these shapes that are very unique and that have white paper behind it. Now, before it dries, this is where I want to take my brush without washing it, take some of that sepia directly from my paper, and then I want to drop in that sepia in certain spots where I know it's going to be the darkest. So this section is already starting to dry. So I want to keep in mind that when I'm doing my final painting, I do want to do this a little bit quicker than what I'm doing or I want to actually do smaller sections on my actual painting. So this is kind of the texture that I'm looking for. Um, this is going to do two things. One, it's going to kind of help combine the two colors that we're using in the top of our pet. But it's also going to give us that really bright contrast between the white of the paper and then the splotches. Without having to paint the individual splotches. Now, as I paint my splotches on my final paper, I'm going to be aware of kind of where my natural divisions are going to be and then try my best to help show those natural divisions. So whenever I'm painting the chest here and blending it into paper, I am thinking about wanting it to be more triangular in nature. So I do want the chest here to be the lowest point and the edges of the shoulders to be higher. And I'm noticing some of these curves of the neck. So I'm going to start off here on this left hand side because that's going to be the darkest, and I'll start off with my splotches. I've got my fully loaded brush. I know that here it's going to be quite dark because that's kind of where it's coming into the neck. And now, as I come down, now I can kind of start to splotch it out. I'm taking a peek at my reference photo to see if I can kind of somewhat mimic these splotches. I'm going to kind of pause once I get to this fold. But I also know that I want to I kind of help with the shape here. So I'm going to start to make my little shape coming down to the center, and then this is where I'm going to stop it. And now I'm gonna go back and grab my sepia before it dries. And in those spots where it's the darkest drop in that sepia. Drying my brush and using a dry brush, just kind of lift up if anything got a little bit too intense. I'm going back to that shadow violet. And now I'm going to work on this little section here leaving some of the paper to shine through. And then, of course, I'm noticing that there's kind of this arch of the kind of shape the fur. Then you've got some of your splotches here. No, I don't want to do too much before I drop in the color, so I'm going to stop there. And then drop in where it's the darkest, which is kind of in the center here. It's going to be the darkest. Grab a little bit more shadow violet. Now, I'm noticing that it's getting a little bit dark here, so I want to make sure that I'm not that I am leaving some of this paper to shine through. So over on this right hand side, I am going to keep these dots separate. So I do want some of that white in between. The reason being is that I want to make sure that it's very apparent that there's white underneath. And so if I don't add, if I try to overdo the spots and have them to connected, it's gonna read that there's no white paper underneath or that there's no white fur, I should say, not no white paper. The same here in the neck, I'm going to leave a little bit more of this white paper open. 9. Adding Shadows with Gray: Alright, so now I'm going to use a shadow violet for adding some shadows around the eyes and ears. This is going to act as instead of my black. So I'll add some black details, but I do want more of the darker details to be the shadow violet than the black. So I am mixing up kind of a slightly darker opacity shadow violet, but still mixed with quite a bit of water. I'm gonna start in the ears here where it's going to be the darkest. If I'm noticing that there are some very dark sections anywhere, I can go back and drop in some of that shadow violet directly from my pan. It can be pretty challenging when you're looking at your reference photo, especially one that has so many details in it to kind of pick out which of the details are the most important to paint. Sometimes it's easy to get lost in those details. Now, for the main face, we are going to look at where is the darkest. So, of course, it's around the eyes here. Kind of bringing into this cheek bone at the bottom, and then it'll come around here. And, of course, these little eyebrows is where it's going to be the darkest. Still following the curve of the eye. We've got a little darker of a section here. Makes up a little bit more of that shadow violet. Of course, it's the darkest here above the eyes. I'm gonna do another layer there. Okay. There is a little bit of that brown coming into the center of the eye. Let's see if that helps a Dar eye placement. All right. Let's try this once again. O. And we'll add some of our darkest shadow here to that crease in the ear. I'm going to bring that dark actually it's kind of like a line around the edge here. 10. Color Corrections: Alright, so we are going to do a few color corrections here before we add our black layer. And so whenever I do color corrections, I want to take a peek at where do I need to kind of amp up my colors? And so when I first take a peek at mine, I am looking at the eyes, so I do want to add a little bit more color into the eye area as a second layer of wet on dry. So I'm going to add just a little bit more of that kind of honey color. And then I also want to add a little bit more of this yellow. It's not looking kind of it's not looking bright enough to me, especially in this right eye where I kind of had lifted a bunch of color and reworked it a bunch. Alright, and then I'm going to take a peek at some of these pinks in the nose area, in the nose and the mouth. So this is kind of a good time to do glazing. So I've got a very, very water down pink. And I'm going over some of these areas where I'm noticing that it just needs a little bit more pop of color, particularly in the nose and then in this mouth area. Now, glazing happens when we go over sections that we've already painted with this really watered down mixture. And so it just really helps it pop. I can also glaze around the eyes if I need a little bit of extra pink around the eyes, especially in the centers here. I can blend out any of those edges. Now, the nice thing about glazing on top of these browns is that it also helps to kind of bring the browns to life a little bit, adding a little layer of that pink. And so I might end up going into a few more sections with this pink, particularly in this ear that's kind of highlighted by the sun. This section of the mouth. All right. And then I do want to adjust the darkness on this left hand side, so I noticed that I need this section to be a little bit darker. I'm going to do that before I add my layer of black because I want this kind of left hand side to be a little bit darker. So I'm going to do all around that outer edge. And then also this little triangle that you see on the inside here. You're around the eye a little bit. I'm really wanting to make sure that's really nice and dark. This is also the stage that I can glaze over anything that needs to be um, blend it a little bit better. So if these highlights around the eyes are too much, I can also glaze over those. If I need a little bit more gray around the nose here, I can glaze over this, just kind of make it a little bit darker. I can also use a wet brush and blend some of these edges if these edges have gotten too hard. 11. Last layer using Black: Alright, so when I start with my black, I do want to start with the darkest areas first. So here I'm using lunar black. So it is a granulating color by Daniel Smith. If you do not like granulating colors, you can use a regular color. And I want to start in the eyes here where I'm seeing the blackest of the blacks. I want to use it kind of sparingly. So I'm adding along the top eyelid here of the eye. Outlining that little kind of divot in the middle here. And then I'm going to extend that black a little bit along the base. This is where I might come back and use a little micron pen to really get it nice and fine. And then I'm going to add a little bit of that black in the center of the pupil to really help that pop a little bit. Move on to the next I. I'm going to do a little bit of a ring around the top of the iris. And then with this eye, particularly, I do want to also do a dark black along the top of that eye. But I'm trying to keep a little sliver of that color underneath. I think I went a little too far. So I'm trying to keep a little sliver of that paper or that brown that's underneath in between. Once again, if you want to do this step with your smallest brush, it's obviously an option. A little.in the very center. And now I do want to use this darkest black to I want to make sure that I'm using the darkest black to frame the face with the ears. So in this line here where the ears are meeting up with the face, it's where it is the darkest. I do want to add a really nice clean line. I can extend it. To the bottom of the ear. I can also extend it slightly along this left side of the face, which is going to help kind of highlight that section. I'm going to do the same on this right side, adding that line of black in between where the ear is attaching to the eye. And then a very fine line. I'm going to leave that section open, but a very, very fine black along the bottom of this ear, I kind of left a little bit of the brown to shine through, so I didn't fully outline it. And now this black I also want to use in the darkest spots of the nose. So that's going to be obviously the nostrils here of the nose. And then I also want a little bit of the outer edge of this nose to be outlined just lightly. I think that this black in the center got a little bit too dark, so I'm gonna lift that up a little bit. This is the other nice thing about using this lunar black as a granulating color for your pet portraits is that it does lift up really nicely. So if you do make mistake, when you're painting, you can usually rewet it with water and then lift it pretty easily. We've got this little kind of V at the base here of the nose. And now, this black here I can use on this right side of the face of the lower lip here. Kind of in this space running under that big lip. I might also use a little bit under this other side. I do want to use this black sparingly, though, so I do really want to use it where it is the darkest. I'm gonna start adding a little bit of water to that black, and then I'm going to come and use it in a broader sense, so water down a little bit in where the darkest spots should be. And I'm using the edge of my brush with this watered down black. And now I am finding that I'm kind of losing the mouth here into the neck. And so I am going to use this black to kind of help create a little bit of a division between the two. I'm not fully outlining it. However, I am kind of using a dotted line almost to just emphasize the top part of the face here. And then I might also do that along this just this edge of the face here. I don't think I need to do it on this right side. I'm worried about having that kind of come get a little bit too intense in color. Can I add a little bit of darker spots. You don't want them to get too dark, though. And now I do want to add a little bit of this watered down black to the body here. So I'm using very watered down kind of keeping it in these areas where it's the darkest adding a second layer. You can always add a few individual oh which actually that helps a lot because I think this left hand side, when I did the body here, I kind of joined these globs together a little bit too much. And so to get that nice brindle effect, adding and extending it a little bit on hand, this side is going to actually help with the whole kind of illusion of the brindle there. Alright. And then at some point, we have to kind of stop and say, Enough is enough. We're gonna do the background splash, and then we can always come back and add more details if we need to. But sometimes continuing to work on these areas sometimes helps it, sometimes hurts it. It can hurt it by muddying up the layers that are underneath. And so, instead of having those really nice clean layers, you end up muddying up your layers a little bit. So I am going to stop there. Like I said, I can always come back with some fresh eyes once I do this background layer and see, are there any areas that need a little bit more definition, a little bit darker of shadow, or is it looking decent the way that it is? So, before I keep moving, we're going to do our background color. 12. Optional: Colorful Splash in the Background: Alright, so I'm cleaning off a section of my palette because I'm going to mix my colorful splash color that I want to use in the background. Now, I do ask all my clients if there's a specific color that they would like, and the client Tilly's owners would like an orange Sherbet color. And so I'm switching out my water. I'm gonna add some water to my palette. Let me give it a slightly larger brush to speed this up. Orange sherbet. I am going to use cadmium orange hue for this orange sherbet. Then I'm going to take a peek and see what it might look like adding some Chinese white to see if that kind of creates this kind of orange set look that we're looking for. Here I've got this little orange sherbet color that is obviously going to be mixed with water in the background. I do think that going more transparent with this orange sherbet is going to look better than going too dark. So obviously, if I have too opaque of a color, it's gonna kind of drown out all the details on our dog. So I'll wash off my brush, and then I'm going to actually do a slightly different technique, which is a wet-on-wet in the background. I'm going to start in the neck area because I want to make sure that I've got these whites really nicely framed. However, I don't want to go down too far here with my water because I do want these nice details to kind of stick out. And so if I bring that orange down too far, I think it's gonna just get too busy. So I'm gonna wet the area that I want to add the orange, and then I'll come and I'll grab some of my orange, keeping my paper towel close. If I want to blend it into the edges at all, I can dry my brush and use a dry brush to kind of blend those edges. Then I'm going to rotate and add my colorful splash around the top of the head. Now, this is definitely just a suggestion. You do not need to do these colorful splashes. You can choose your own colorful splash if you would like, or if you want to paint a whole background, you are also more than welcome to do that, too. So I'm going to just kind of amplify the shape of the head. So I'm going to kind of amplify this tilt. So instead of adding I got a hair in there. So instead of adding more of a color splash coming on this way to even it out, I want to amplify that head tilt. The owners did mention that that head tilt was something that is very unique to Tilly, that whenever she is trying to listen to her owners, she always tilts her head. And so I don't want to even out that tilt by adding more pigment up on this side. I want to accentuate it by adding more pigment over in this direction. So you see how that tilt just kind of became accentuated based on where I added that color splash. I do always like to add a little bit more opaque of color closest towards the head. I did try on purpose to leave a little bit of white along this left edge of the body just so that it reads that there's definitely white in the body. Adding a color splash like this behind your pets also helps to emphasize features like that where, you know, part of the body is white because you're adding some color right next door. Now, I could leave it like this. However, I'm feeling like I wanted to add just a little bit of an extra blob of this sherbet color here, just kind of balance things out. Sometimes I end up hating it. Sometimes I like it. Yeah, I think that probably wasn't the best option, but since it doesn't really lift very well. I'm gonna just try to make the shape a little bit smaller there. Alright now, I'm gonna need to let this dry for at least a few hours before I take the masking fluid off and then go in and add any sort of extra details. 13. Final Details: Removing Masking Fluid, adding black pen, adding white Gouache: Alright, so I've let my painting dry for a few hours. I'm coming back to now look at the last few details and to make any sort of corrections or adjustments before I send off a picture of it to my client. The first thing I'm going to do is take off the masking fluid from the eyes, and then I'm going to adjust and see if I like the placement of where it is, if I need to add anything or take anything away. And so I am going to use my smallest round size zero for this. I am going to use it to add just a little hint of blue to one of the highlights in this right eye. I just want to break apart that rectangular shape. And so doing that with just a little hint of blue sometimes can bring the kind of sky color into your painting. Then I can use a damp brush and just kind of adjust the shape of the other highlight. And I will do the same thing with this highlight, so I'm noticing that this edge needs to be a little bit more curved for the curve of the eye there. And then, same thing. I want to break up this left side. Just a little bit. I don't want that edge of that left highlight there to be so straight and linear. So just by breaking up that edge of the highlight, it actually helps quite a bit. Now, a few little extra things that you can do here if you are finding that your eyes are looking off or you need to just kind of highlight them a little bit. Sometimes I come in and use a micron pen around the eyes, particularly if you have around the edge, such as this left hand eye where you need a really fine line. Sometimes I will also use this if I have to outline around the highlights of the eyes, if I need to kind of extend anything in the center of that eye, Yep. Same here if I need to make that just a little bit more. You'll obviously just want to be cautious with this because it is permanent. And so you will not be able to lift it up once you add any sort of detail lines with this micron pen. The same here. You can always add some extra fine detail lines to the nose. If it's something that you're needing to add a little extra to the nose, sometimes I take a peek at the whiskers here and see, do I need to add any sort of little black whiskers. So I'm noticing just a few here that I can add. Now I'm using the lightest touch, obviously. Um, I don't really notice many on this side, although there's a few kind of smaller flecks of one. So just adding a little extra detail here is going to actually really make a big difference. The other point that you can also use a micron pen is on adding a little bit of a hard edge, particularly on certain edges where you need just a little extra um, to define it. So on this left ER I added just a little hint along the base there. In my reference photo, you can see that it is there's there's definitely a hard edge there. And so by adding that with my micron pen, it just kind of helps to give it a little bit more of a clean edge. All right. Then next we'll move on to adding some sort of white details here. So there's a few areas that if you had wanted to add white details, now that the watercolor portion is done, you can definitely always use some PH Martin glee proof white with a small detail brush. Add a little water on your brush, and then you can use it to kind of adjust the highlights in the eyes here. If you need the highlights to be bigger, to be smaller, if you need them a different size, just be careful with this because, of course, you can water it down to make it a little bit more transparent, but it is really hard to take it away and take it off your paper completely once you have it on your paper. The other area that we can use this bleedproof white to add some texture is to the chest and then to the mouth here. And so there are a few options. You can either use bleedproof white to add some texture, or you can also use a charcoal pencil to add some texture. If you choose to use bleedproof white, it could be helpful to use a comb brush. So a comb brush has two different lengths of bristles at the end of it. One set that's cut slightly shorter and one that's cut longer. And so when we dip our brush in water and add some of our bleedproof white. And then if we take a section, I'm going to practice on this section here, we can add little tiny white hairs and add some texture on top of that section without having to do little tiny individual hairs. Now, obviously, the harder you press down, the more pigment you get out. So you do want to practice this a little bit ahead of time, just so that you understand kind of how it works. If I were to use it on my painting, I think I would come in on the nose here and just add a little extra on this area here because, of course, those little white hairs were really challenging to keep white. So we tried our best. But here, just by adding a little bit more texture with this bleed proof white afterwards, you notice that we are able to definitely add those a little bit of those white hairs. Now, if you do not have this at home, this tool, you can always use an individual, a small detail brush for this. This is just kind of a fun option. If you're looking for something to play around with. And also, I mean, if you're looking to do these pet portraits more often, it could be kind of a nice tool for you. So another option if you don't have bleed proof white or if you think it's a little bit too intense of a white is to use a charcoal white pencil for some of the white shading in the chest here. So I'm using my test strip to kind of see how it looks. Now, you have two options. You can either use it without dipping it in water. Sometimes, though it especially if you don't have that rough of a paper, you might not be able to see it all that well. So sometimes I'll just dip it in water. And then I'll go over that same area after I dip it in water. So dipping it in water just kind of activates that charcoal a little bit. It softens it up a little bit so that you can see it a little bit better. Now, of course, it's going to look different than these little tiny white lines. And so if I were to dip and say, add some white here on the chest, so this is kind of what it would look like with some little extra white details on the chest. And obviously, I'd want to kind of bring it the same direction as the hairs. I do think, though, that I'm liking how it's looking with the bleed proof white and this comb pen. So I'm going to do that instead. So I did want to mention that I ended up changing the background color. It dried way too yellow for me. And so I mixed up a little bit of red and orange. So I made a really deep orange and glazed it on top of my yellow. And I was able to then change that background color from this really dry yellow to that slightly more orangy color. And there we have it our German short haired pointer.