Commissioned acrylic pet portrait for Mazz, of her dog Buddy! Buddy’s story is a wonderful one, he had a joyful return to his family after having gone missing for 5 months. I remember a couple times my childhood dog, Wolfy, went missing for only a...

Commissioned acrylic pet portrait for Mazz, of her dog Buddy! Buddy’s story is a wonderful one, he had a joyful return to his family after having gone missing for 5 months. I remember a couple times my childhood dog, Wolfy, went missing for only a short period of time, and came back to us on his own. I can’t imagine the heartache of waiting 5 months, wondering what happened. I’m so glad Buddy has been returned to his home, and it was a pleasure to paint this to commemorate his return!

8.5" X 11" acrylic on illustration board

Well, do I have a lot to say about this painting!  This is the first large scale acrylic piece I’ve taken as a commission in years.  I don’t paint with acrylics very often, so I ran into many roadblocks while unlocking my memories for acrylic painting.  I forgot a lot of little rules that made this very hard going, and even forced me to start all over again after I was about ¼th of the way through painting.  While I don’t have a lot of the progress shots for it, I’ll outline what I did anyway.


First step, as always, are thumbnails.  I did them digitally to work out my composition and colors.  We ended up settling on a difficult color scheme, but it worked out well. Second, I refined my sketch.  I did this digitally too, because making edits is much faster.  But because I would need to transfer this to the final illustration board later, there are more steps.


With the sketch refined, I printed it out to scale so I could affix it to my board.  I carefully cut out around the clump of characters and marked where I wanted them to be. Then I let the cut out sketch sit in water for about 2 minutes, saturating the paper.   Meanwhile, I mixed up a very liquid mixture of clear acrylic medium and modeling paste, and covered the board.  Then put the wet paper sketch down where I marked, took a big soft brush and gently brushed it down with more of the mixture, eliminating bubbles.  Once dry, the sketch sticks off the board a little, giving the piece some extra dimension!  You can see it bump up a bit in the photos above.  The rest of the sketch was loosely transferred with pencil after everything dried.  In this way, I didn’t have to transfer a complex clump of characters to the board with pencil, and added a little extra dimension to it all.


After this I ran into trouble.  I tried a wet-in-wet liquid acrylic technique to block in the sky, and it really looked awful.  All my messing with it didn’t make it look any better, so I cut a new piece of board, repeated the sketch transfer method, and started over.  I also mixed a palette too full of paint!  I later had to scrape paint off and save it in little plastic baggies to make room for on the fly mixtures.  I am using a stay-wet palette, which preserves wet acrylic so you don’t have to constantly remix paint every day you work.  It took quite a while, but it’s done!  I hope to be able to stream acrylic painting in the future.  =)  See the larger version here!


http://shadow-wolf.deviantart.com/art/In-Memoriam-363915147

A few days ago I decided to bring my acrylics out again and get a little practice! I chose to make gifts for two of my friends, in the hopes they will lift their spirits a little. Besides, they ended up being similar palettes so I only had to mix one palette for both pieces.

I chose to make digital studies before making the final paintings so I’d know more of what I’m doing than if I just dive right in. Some aspects of the studies turned out better than the finals, but mostly due in part to how small these are. The crow is 3” X 4” and the Autumn Man is 2.5” X 6”.