It was my pleasure to paint this portrait of the delightful Churro! This is the fourth portrait I have painted for this family; a year ago, I painted three others for them, and this is the latest for their gallery wall. His portrait is painted with acrylics on a 9×12 inch canvas, and was completed November 2024.

Here you can see all four paintings together:

From left to right is: Aspen, Ace, Cooper, and Churro. The owners had requested solid color backgrounds for all of their pets. For Aspen I chose purple, blue for Ace, and teal for Cooper. They wanted to continue the cool color spectrum, and so requested that Churro’s background be a solid green. This was a fantastic choice! The orange and cream colors of his fur contrast nicely with the cool green, and it matches the other three in the set.

Churro’s portrait features my ‘natural realism’ style. In general, I paint in two different styles that the owners can choose from. Colorful Realism makes up the majority of my work, where I use bright rainbow colors to portray the pet on canvas. Natural Realism features the pet’s own natural colors in a realistic style, either with a colorful or neutral background. Some of my natural realism portraits also have a landscape in the background, which is another option, although most people seem to prefer a solid color or gradient for the background.

Churro is a longhaired orange tabby cat, and his fur features lots of oranges and creams, with some tan and rust colors where he has the tabby markings. I used unbleached titanium mixed with burnt sienna, raw sienna, and burnt umber for his fur colors, with a few other colors mixed in for variety of tone and hue. Just a very small touch of light yellow and parchment was mixed in as well to warm up the highlights. His amber colored eyes were painted with bronze yellow and cadmium yellow hue, with a small touch of ivory black for the shading. The ears are pink, with some dark brown along the outer edges. The pink nose was painted with magenta and a touch of unbleached titanium. His eyelids are a pale pink color as well, with very subtle brown outlines. The whiskers were painted using a white acrylic pen.

Overall I am pleased with how this turned out. Although I do love the bold rainbow style, I find that painting natural realism is just as challenging and fun, and I love that I get to do both. As always it is up to the customer and what they request, and I am very flexible when it comes to styles and colors used in my paintings.