Something a little bit different! This is Sadie, and her pet parent asked me to paint two portraits of her – one in your younger years and one when she was older. Both portraits were painted with acrylics on an 8×10 inch canvas. The one with the purple background is when she was younger, and that was completed in July 2024. The one with the magenta background is when she was older, and that was completed August 2024. In both portraits, she is wearing her favorite floral bandana.

Younger Sadie was created from a single reference photo for the pose, and using a secondary reference for the bandana, since she was not wearing one in that photograph. She is a black and white mixed breed dog, so I used medium blue as the base color, and layers of purples, teals, and hot pinks for the highlights and shadows. Her eyes were kept their natural brown color. The bandana was already colorful so I just used the colors and shapes from the actual bandana with not much modifications. The background was originally a solid blue color, but after some deliberation the owner wanted me to change it so the dog stood out more, so I added layers of purples, magenta, and yellow, and love how it turned out! The purple and warm pink colors really make the dog pop!

For older Sadie, one reference photo was used in its entirety, and she was wearing a bandana in this one. I used the same ground colors for her fur, but to make it different I painted the background warm colors: magenta, hot pink, orange and yellow. It complements the other painting while also being unique. And the warm colors contrast nicely with the cool colors in her fur to make the dog pop from the canvas. You will notice that Sadie is missing an eye in this painting, and the remaining eye is cloudy. She had some illness that caused her to lose her eye and go blind in the other, and the owner wanted to preserve that in the portrait, since it made her special. Her personality still shines through despite the missing eye, and you can see how sweet she is.

Both of the above portraits are examples of my ‘Colorful Realism’ style, which features bright rainbow colors while still honoring the pet’s actual colors and markings. This creates a colorful and unique portrait while also retaining the characteristics of the pet.