Thursday, March 10, 2011

Foxy - WIP

This is Foxy, a cute little Pomeranian I'm in the midst of painting.  I have two nieces with Spinal Muscular Atrophy, a genetic disease and I donated a gift certificate for a portrait to a fund raiser to help find a cure.

The lady who won the portrait sent me photos of this little cutie and so far the painting is going very well.  I had initially planned to paint her in gouache or acrylic ink but my fingers instinctively reached for the pastels.

This is just the beginning of laying down of the base colors and I have a lot of refining to do.

I'm using the new ColourFix Suede in the Kangaroo color.  It looks pretty gray here and in the color swatches online but it has a bluish tint to it.  The owner of Foxy said she wanted a steel blue as a background color and this seemed fairly close to that color.  This is only the second time I've used this support (& I still haven't finished the first piece!) and I like it ok.  It's similar to PastelMat by Clairefontaine but doesn't seem to have the flaws I've noticed in the PastelMat.  It seems to work the same as the PastelMat in that blending is pretty difficult until the layers are built up. 

Oh, as an aside, the pipe insulation blenders I wrote about in a previous post don't seem to work well after the initial layers and tend to remove the pastel instead of blending it.  I may just need more practice with them and the paper though.  Much as I dislike the feel of the pastel dust, the fingers are certainly the best blenders for nearly every pastel painting situation I've come across yet!

Anyway, I hope to be  able to finish this by the first of next week at the latest. 

3 comments:

Sue Clinker said...

Pretty dog Jan ... look forward to seeing progress - I haven't come across Colourfix Suede but no doubt it will find its way to the UK evenutally :o)

Sorry to hear about your nieces - I hope they aren't too badly affected by this horrible disease

Unknown said...

Oh this is turning out just darlingW!

Jan said...

Thanks so much Sue and Brenda! A little more progress but with the time change, I can't seem to stay awake long enough to do much to it!