Painting Dogs Is This Artist's Life

If it weren't for the fact that animals rarely like to pose, it would be true to say that animal portrait painting is just the same as human portraiture. Capturing the animal's attention the entire time is a challenge for an artist.

This is the field in which a female artist of Wilmington has specialized. The Delaware family are her relatives.

The paintings that her grandfather made included a famous collection which showed the sea and different landscapes. By age 3, this female artist started painting as well.

Even then, she drew mostly animals. By the time she was 10, she had her own show at the local library, and by the time she was 12 she was a children's book illustrator.

She learned all about the different types of dance with the help of dance teachers in Philadelphia. For many years she did the solo dance work, doing a very convincing death scene one night in a show when she accidentally took a mouthful of kerosene from a lamp.

She paints a lot of animal portraits, but painting man's best friend the dog is her main focus. The way she starts on a dog's portraits grabs at your interest. She sketches as much as she can while the dog's owner holds the dog still.

While she tries to find the best pose that would suit the dog, her pencil just seems to fly over her sketchpad. Meanwhile, she talks to the dog and compliments him for his appearance and behavior. She uses different kinds of props to grab the animal's attention.

She asks for the photographs that the owner might have of the dog and seeks permission from him to make copies for her collection. The colors she would use are determined by looking at the colors of the hair which she snips from the tail, ears, and tummy. For every dog, there are snips that she files.

She decides on a pose and a composition with the perfect background to use for the photograph. The kind of dog or animal used in the shot will be the basis for the selection of the latter. She actually decided on sitting in a duck blind to make the sketches for the background of a Chesapeake Bay retriever portrait.

Dogs already have their own views, just like people, she observed. An American pointer proves this point when he crept up behind one artist and tore her painting apart with his teeth. Based from the fact that he had to have a large amount of medication after this, we can probably conclude that the painting was terrible.

If she does portraits of beagles or bassets, she puts in a paw print along with the scenery and puts the kennel club's identifying symbols on the back. She has even obtained abstract backgrounds done with the help of her own dog's paw when he cooperates in painting.

There is hardly any cooperation that can most of the time be expected by animals. Because one model left with one of the female dogs, portrait painting was stopped for the day. It may seem like a common thing, but odd and unexplainable things do happen when painting an animal's portrait.