More Dogs of Various Sorts

I’ve been enjoying painting dogs this week, both in my sketchbook and in larger paintings. I’ve also been reading several books on wolves, coyotes, and foxes; I always love learning about wild canids.

I’m still recovering from my concussion and can’t do a whole lot of any one thing before I have to either rest or switch to some activity that uses a different part of my brain. Painting seems to tire me less than pretty much anything else, so I’ve been doing a fair amount of it, especially when I need to calm my mind. I’ve been painting dogs for the past few days, but we just got 17 inches of snow and it’s still snowing hard, so I’ll probably be trying my hand at snow scenes soon.

Here’s Gomez, the sweet Basset Hound I painted a while ago. I decided to do another painting from the same photo but make a few changes in emphasis and background.

Then I painted my sweet Beagle boy, Milo. This was done using a reference photo of him lying on my lap looking up at my face. I love painting Milo and am now working on another of him using a paper with a different surface to get a different effect.

And here are some African Wild Dog or Painted Dog sketches, using Arielle’s photos from her trip to South Africa last summer. I still don’t have the proportions quite right, but I’m going to keep practicing these until I have a feel for them. As with most of my paintings, these are done with just watercolor, without sketching beforehand. I was inspired to paint these Wild Dogs both by Arielle’s photos and by a blog entry by Alison Nicholls, a watercolor artist who paints many African animals and who did a recent blog post about Painted Dogs.