I was lucky with my painting of Theodore–my first stages of painting came together quickly with a resemblance. You never know if this will happen or not. A lot of paintings start out with the uglies and don’t come together until later on. The trickiest part of this portrait (as with all white dogs) is to get enough dimension and shadow in the white fur without making the tone of the fur read as anything other than white. I paint from dark to light–so a lot of my white animals look pretty gray until the final moments. I also tend to hide quite a bit of color in the whites–some pink, lavender or cream are often visible if you look hard enough. I’ve used a bit of cream here in the light areas and some blue in the shadows.
