Waldo’s Portrait, A Wedding Gift

A few months ago, I had the pleasure of attending the wedding of the daughter of my dear friend, whom I have known since I was 5. My gift to the new married couple was a pet portrait of their beloved Waldo, an adorable Goldendoodle.

I created a pencil sketch from the photos I was provided and  I also added the cloudy sky background to add some drama. Then I scanned my sketch and merged the whole thing into a digital color proof that I find is a good tool for clients to get a clear idea of what the finished painting will look like.

Before I started selling my paintings, my early career was in advertising where I became fluent in a lot of graphic software including Photoshop. That turned out to be very helpful in my pet portraits today as it allows me to play with photos, retouch them or combine them to create a good reference for the final painting. One note though: the digital art is only a reference tool for me–All my portraits are entirely original art and hand-painted by me. There are a lot of pet portraits being created these days that are prints of digitally created files. There’s nothing wrong with this if you understand that’s what you’re getting–but it’s not what I do.