Here is where I was at before with the rough acrylic underpainting completed.
Here is the reference photo. Max passed away at a young age and deteriorated rapidly once diagnosed with a tumour. We didn't have many photos of him . This was the clearest one we had.
A general photo of him
Here I'm starting to come back in with Oil and do his face.
I did his eyes early on and I liked them enough to not fiddle with them much except to soften his expression a little as I felt he looked a bit stern in the photo. You can't change the expression a lot because when a pet ' smiles' it's not just their mouth and eyes that change shape but their whole face.I can't guess the changes as it would be too hard to get it to look like them.
Ideally we would have had a happy photo to start with but in memorial portraits that's not always possible. Make sure you take lots of flattering , sharp closeups of your pets as they grow! You never know what's around the corner.
Above - I'm starting to paint his mat after having roughly painted some colour through Max's coat. I wanted to get the overall colour scheme down so I could see how the planned mauve background colour would look when I put it on. He used to love to sit on his mat on the kitchen bench and watch everything.
Here I have the background colour in place. Now I'll go back and finish off his fur colouring properly.
Adding more colour. This photo is a bit yellow although I do try and get as much colour into the portrait as I can while still having it look like Max. I adjust things as I go along.
The finished memorial portrait of
Max
40 x 50cms image size
Custom framed oil
Peter with his portrait of Max
We also had an artist quality reproduction of the portrait created . It will be a gift for the vets who helped out so much and grew really attached to him.
If you have family who love your pet as much as you I can now offer reproductions so they can enjoy a portrait too!
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