How to Paint a Pug Dog Portrait
This is my portrait of the lovely Sandy. I filmed a video of the process and sped it up into a two-minute time lapse painting set to music. You'll recognize the music from the awesome ballet scene with the hippos and alligators in the original Fantasia movie from 1940. I loved it when I was a little kid and used to dance to it on my rebounder in front of the TV. Check it out:
Sandy has such a cute smile. I'll be adjusting the photos a bit to reflect Sandy's characteristic pose and look. Her eyes look blue in the middle photo, but it's just the way the flash reflects off the retina in animals - similar to "red eye" in people photos. In my rough pose sketch, I tilted her head to the side and adjusted her legs and backside to capture the way she usually sits. I played around with different compositions in Photoshop. On the top left is her characteristic sitting pose, in the middle is her head tilt, and on the right is a reference photo that includes her feet, since they are cropped out of the other pictures. Isn't she cute?
In Photoshop, I combined characteristics from each photo. I selected the areas I wanted to copy, cleaned up the edges using the Magic Wand Tool, and selected the white area around the body parts. I then used the Inverse Selection command to select the body part, and deleted the background image to make a transparent background. I then copied the selected area and pasted her face from the first picture and paws onto the body photo. I used the Free Transform command to scale and flip the pasted layers to the appropriate size and angle, and then selected Merge Visible Layers to collapse the image into one layer.
Here's the sketch I made from my combination of reference photos. Notice how her body pose is tilted to the middle a bit relative to the photo on the left.
As usual with my portrait sketches, this is just a rough line drawing to check the pose, so it doesn't look like Sandy yet. Now that I'm happy with the pose, I can get started on the painting. This portrait reminds me a bit of my painting of Fig Newton a few years ago. I never try for photo-realism, I strive for a mix of likeness and character.
In my video of Sandy's progress, I've taken several stills to show the painting in action. The painting measures 20"x24", so it's probably slightly larger than life. Here's the pink and purple underpainting, which is meant to show through her fur a bit and give it a glow:
Next, I painted in the blackest areas on her face. Portraits are intimidating for beginners because they look so weird at the beginning. They always look so strange without the eyes painted in! Use a big brush and map in the colors and shapes fast at this stage so you don't get bogged down and give up. I'm using my angle shader in this shot:
Next, I started on her fur. I used a mixture of mostly Titan Buff, with a bit of Burnt Umber mixed in in places to make it darker. I thinned it out so that the purple would show through slightly. This part of the video turned out a little blurry since the camera was focusing on my hand instead of the painting, but you can get the general idea.
I took a break from the big brush and used the small round brush to work on her eyes. In this shot, I'm adding just a wee bit of Payne's Grey, actually a navy blue-black, to the center of her eyes. This won't look blue in the finished product - it just looks like a blacker black that makes the eye look more three-dimensional. For more advice, check out my detailed tutorial on painting eyes.
I used my smaller round brush again to work on the details of her face. The likeness is getting better now. I added her purple collar. I've roughed in the details in her body, but I'm going to paint in the background before doing any detail on the paws.
Next, I painted in the basic colors and shapes of the background, and made some slight adjustments to her body.
Finally, I added the contours in her bed to make her look like she's sinking in a little bit. To make the contours I added alternating lines of light and dark blues and whites from my sidemix. I wrote her name on her tag with my tiny detail brush. Here's the finished portrait:
Here's a closeup of Sandy's face:
