Friday is chocolate pancake day, so deadline pressure forced me to put something on paper between slinging batter. Here is another dog, one of Pavlov's subjects.
This took about half an hour, reminding me that getting a little practice from time to time is not such a commitment. Perhaps any artists around could suggest improvements to my method:
0-5 minutes: Assemble materials, then "What am I doing? I don't know what I'm doing. I can't do this."
5-10: Lightly pencil an outline to get the proportions right. They aren't right. Trace the iPad. Artistic license.
10-15: Eye on the left. If the eyes aren't any good, it's useless. The eye doesn't look very good by itself.
15-20: Eye on the right. The eyes are not symmetric. The eyes in the model aren't symmetric either. It's a photo of a stuffed dog. Try to be faithful to the model, to avoid making it worse.
20-25: Despair. It's awful. Snout and ears. Impossible to suggest fur with a crayon. Just trying to match tones, cheating like "Tim's Vermeer" (mk). Omit the saliva-catcher. Artistic license.
25-30: More rushed shading and finger-smudging to even out the rough lines. Show it to the kid. He looks up from Wimpy Kid and says "Wow." It's not so bad from a distance.
Earlier effort to depict a Russian dog on TNG's post:
Hope this isn't a spoiler, but I think you'll be pleased to find a very pretty lighthouse when you step back and look at your picture. A friend is taking some oil painting lessons. He got some good results, despite little experience. So I shopped for some oils, looking for cheap primary colors to start. The nearest I could find is a set of eight or so colors, in very tiny tubes. Is paint such a big expense?
It's not cheap, but a little paint goes a long way, and you can mix to get the range you want. You'll want some liquin and some linseed or walnut oil to mix with the paints to thin them and get different textures. I paint on plywood because I think canvass is a pain. We watched Tim's Vermeer last night. Really interesting. I have little doubt that Vermeer was doing something like that. It changes his art for me. Now I see it an amazing labor, but accessible.
I haven't seen it yet. Just watched that though. That's basically the trick I try to do in my minds eye. I try to paint the light, not the objects. That said, I think that is the starting point for interesting paintings. If you can achieve that technically, then you can vary it with purpose.
That there looks like an entlebucher. Fine work!