Wedding Gift Painting of a Chocolate Lab

I was commissioned to create a painting as a very special wedding gift. Bear is a handsome chocolate lab, and this painting was going to be quite large–24″ x 18″. As you can see, the original photo was a good one of Bear but the background was less than exciting. Because the painting was going to be sizable, there was room to use a more complex background than some of my smaller paintings.

I knew that Bear’s owners were frequently in upstate NY, an area I know quite well–and with Bear’s warm coloring, it seemed a natural fit to place him in an autumn landscape with soft mountains in the background.

I knew I’d hit it when my client told me the background looked almost identical to the country home that belonged to Bear’s owner.