Hannah WIP and Wilds follow-up

Here is the current WIP for Hannah, a choclate lab. There is a little more room at the top than I was able to scan. I should finish this one today.

I did take a break Sunday and Monday and went to the Wilds,a wildlife preserve, about 50 miles from where I live, menitioned in an earlier post. Below are some of the pictures I took. I have a few nice ones, but not as many as I would like. I will post some of the others in the future.

We went for an overnight -- was nice to get away from the routine, eat some good food and visit with a friend.



On the way to the Wilds, I took a not so long side trip to visit the Leslie Cope Gallery in Roseville, Ohio. A friend of mine has some of his originals and turned me on to his work. Sadly there is not much on the net or in the literature about him. I hope to go back to this gallery, which his widow runs sometime soon as I did not see it all with the time we had. His last painting in progress was on the easel in his studio there. He is know for his farm scenes and horses, primarily, though he also did coastal scenes and murals. He was a codesigner for McCoy pottery. Roseville and the surrounding towns were once a thriving pottery center. I do not know enough about him, but I hope to find out more in the future. He was quite prolific, I really like his animals, of course, and admire his passion. I do feel fortunate to be able to visist his studio and gallery.

Lastly, I not sure I like this new blog design, I was trying to correct where the gadges (about me, links, blogrool, etc.) show up. I can only view them at the bottom of the page now, but want them at the side. Where do they show up when you look at the page? I know how I am supposed to fix this in layout, but was not working for me, so I go sidetracked in design and ended up with this one for now.

Pet Portraits finished and WIP

Here is Abbey finished. As I was struggling so much with making up poses, I have decided to take existing photos, though missing detail when enlarged and just make a few modifications. I have finished Cleo using the photo below. There is a tad more definition in the face than I could get with my scanner.



Here is a sketch of Hannah, whom I hope to work on today quite a bit. I think using these photos and a sitting pose helps to have a little more head area to work on, which I like.

Abbey, WIP 2

This is as far as I got with Abbey, yesterday. I know it does not look like much, but it takes alot of layering to get that black fur. I may refine her nose and bridge of her nose more. I usually like to do the background at the same time, but since I scrapped the first one with alot of background time in it, I just concentrated on the dog first in this one. I will try to do the background the same as I did with Missey so that they are compatable. I did spend some time reviewing the reference photos for the other dogs, yesterday, also. Did alot of editing in my photo programs. And though they will be a little bigger than I orignally planned, I am going to use some existing reference photos more completely than I had originally planned to do the other three. I would prefer to do them a little larger than these first two and I just don't have the time to struggle with what I can't see. I am afraid that my previous sketches are just not detailed enough. I was getting hung up on trying to make the poses "more sophisticated" and all similiar in size.