A portrait of a white and brindle Staffordshire Bull Terrier dog named Barnaby on a dark army green background. Acrylic painting on 11×14 inch canvas, completed on August 4, 2025. This portrait was painted in my natural colors realistic style, with the dark green background color chosen by the owner.
The background color was color matched to a color swatch from the internet for “army green”. It is mixed from four different colors: equal amounts of grey-green, light olive green, Hooker’s green, and raw umber. The paint, when it was still wet, looked exactly like the color on the screen, but when it dried, it dried much darker than I anticipated. I am aware that acrylics always dry darker than they look on the palette, but this was several shades darker than I expected. But the owner was happy with it so that is all that matters. If I had it to do over again, I would mix a little less raw umber and a little more grey-green, and perhaps a touch of titanium white, to brighten it.
Barnaby is mostly white, with a patch of brindle on the left side of his head near his ear, and around the base of that ear. He also has a few brown spots on the other ear, and on his muzzle. He has black spots on his skin all over his body that are covered in white hair and show up better in bright light or when he is wet. They are easiest to see on his chest and belly, where the hair is sparser.
Painting a white animal with acrylics is always a little bit of a challenge, because white animals are never truly ‘white’. There is a lot of shading in the fur (or feathers or scales) and the brightest whites should be reserved only for the lightest highlights, and even then they should be used sparingly. This can present a challenge when working with customer’s photos, since white animals tend to get washed out in photographs due to the digital automatic white balance correction present in most modern phone cameras and digital point and click cameras. This is because the camera tries to compensate for the darker background by making the white lighter than it really is, and when that happens, there is a lot of detail and shading that is lost in a digital photograph taken with a phone. This tends to make the pet look very flat and faded out, with a loss of detail not only in the fur texture but also in the shadows along the contours of their body and face.
In this case, using multiple reference photos of the pet taken in a variety of light sources will help me to get a better idea of the animal’s shape and fur texture, and I try not to leave the canvas color to show through too much. Making a white animal not pure white will make the painting more realistic. Thus, unless I am working on a ‘colorful realism’ or psychedelic style, I will add a base layer of a medium warm grey mixed with some unbleached titanium for warmth. On top of this layer, I will use parchment and titanium white in thin layers to add fur details and highlights, and ivory black and raw sienna for shading. Pets that have a lot of white fur, especially short haired dogs, will also have a lot of pink skin showing through, especially on their ears, around the eyes, muzzle, and chest, where the fur is thinner or sparse.
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I hope you enjoy this wonderful painting of Barnaby the Staffordshire bull terrier dog! If you want a hand painted portrait of your own pet, please click on the Pet Portraits tab above. I have been creating hand-painted pet portraits professionally since 2017, and have over 150 portraits of pets of all kinds in my portfolio, including dogs, cats, sheep, lizards, birds, rodents, and many others.
I create my portraits with archival acrylic paints on high quality cotton stretched canvas, ranging in size from 5×7 inches to 48×60 inches for rectangular shapes, and from 6×6 inches to 30×30 inches for square shapes. I work from your photos, and communicate the entire process via regular email updates. I typically book out 2-3 months in advance, so if you want a portrait for a gift, please contact me in advance to reserve your spot on my schedule.
