Painting the Family Dog in Watercolor

If you've been wondering where I've been for the last seven or eight months. I have been dedicating my time to practicing and ultimately performing the most perfect flip in the world. Having achieved the most perfect flip in the world, I'm back and ready to watch more YouTube videos. Jokes and flips aside, I should probably explain where I've been. I worked on a children's book for a few months and just couldn't get back to YouTube videos. I've had a bumpy six months and it distracts me. that stops me from doing things like this, so everything seems to be back in order and here we go today.

I'm working on a portrait of my dog ​​Diego, who was sitting at my feet in my living room and I really liked the way the light was. the shadows were working on it so I took a quick photo with my phone and thought I'd use it today as a reference for this little sketchbook

painting

. I'm working on the perfect bonus sketchbook that you may have seen before when I was starting the video. It's great. little sketchbook, it has very nice

watercolor

paper and it's not cheap, but it's great. I'm really enjoying this sketchbook and am having fun filling it with these little 5 by 7 inch fish sketches, as always.

I started with the larger masses and am working towards more detailed things and for a small sketch like this I usually leave the police drawing somewhat unfinished. I don't try to make sure every little detail and nuance is there in the drawing. It's more of a kind of skeletal framework that I can go back to with the paint and, if all the proportions are right and there are enough indications of where things are, I usually have enough to start

painting

it and make it work well, except once in a while, you see, you have to revise and that's what I had to do on the leg, just, you know, move things around a little bit, change things, that's what drawing is about, it's about starting with the masses larger and find your way to more details. and if you have to delete it, correct, delete and correct.

I'm starting to paint a little sketch here. I have my little portable palette here and what I'm doing is mixing a little bit of Burnt Sienna with Payne's gray and that's going to give me kind of a medium gray that I want to use for most of the painting. Here now what I'm doing is if you look at the reference and this is what I like to do. I like, if I can, to look. in what are the lightest and darkest values ​​and if you look at Diego here you can see that there is a stronger light that hits the right side of his snout, the right side for us you know there is some light that hits his paws and a little, I think. on one of his ears, but for the most part the rest of the composition will be darker than those lighter points and that's what I'm doing and I'm adding grays and I'm warming it up when it crosses Diego's. body there because I know I'll come back with more color on top, but I want to have a little color variation.

I know this will also be pretty clear once it dries. Watercolor always seems to work quite well. a little bit lighter than how you placed it or at least a little bit lighter, so I left it, as you can see here. I left some areas white and for the most part they will remain white paper for the rest of this little painting. I'm going to come back with some burnt sienna and I'm just popping in some of those richer, warmer burnt sienna areas that I'm seeing in the reference, so it would be like his ears are quite strong, a warm brown color and warm, his body is Much of the middle part of his body will be much darker, but I'm starting with burnt sienna.

I'm adding a little bit of Payne's gray just to get a little bit of variation, a little bit of a color shift. Those areas that may or may not ultimately affect the final paint, I may end up pointing back in some of those areas, but you can see me, you know, putting in a little bit of burnt sienna and then adding a little bit of ultramarine blue. o Payne is gray and I just let him bleed that way. I really like painting Diego partly because he has all the values ​​in his fur, he has very light white fur, he has medium brown fur and then he has black fur, so he always has all three, he already has the whole range of values ​​in his fur pattern, so it's always a lot of fun to paint him, so if you've seen my work before, you've probably seen me draw him here and there from behind. with a little more burnt sienna, he has a little bell shaped dog tag that I'm working on and leaving that little spot, the bottom color I already painted, his eyes are very brown at this point, I'm just falling . a little bit of burnt sienna knowing I'll come back with some dark shades and then that burnt sienna will show up as her eye color, there aren't many different colors in this one, at least at this point I'm working in more grays during some of the shadow areas and trying to establish the pattern of light and dark happening in the background.

I'm being very careful not to let the paint get on his forehead. I want a nice, crisp line there. I want you to do it especially on top of his. His head appears against the background as I get closer to his paws. I rely on these shadows to define his legs and his legs and basically the shapes they have and that kind of thing at this point. I've decided to start delving into some of the really dark areas. I want to establish where my darkest areas are or at least some of them so I can start to evaluate if my mids are dark enough or if they will need to be strengthened and darkened.

What I'm doing is I'm going in and popping into some of those areas that I know are going to be completely dark, so I'm going in for the most part with fully saturated Payne gray. This is what I was talking about before. I had come in with a little bit of burnt sienna as a kind of backing shape for her eyes and now I'm going to come back with a really strong darkness and defining the edges of her eyes, her pupils, that kind of thing, even trying to leave just a small touch of glitter to highlight one of the eyes.

I'm still working on some of those mid-value shapes. I'm taking mostly burnt sienna and you'll see me adding a little bit of that. Payne's gray that is faded. I really like this paint it actually works back and forth between Payne Gray and Burnt Sienna. I bought a real microphone to use for these voiceovers now in the past. I just used my computer's microphone so I hope things sound a little better and this way I don't have to shoot my voice two or three feet away from the computer so I hope it sounds better. At this point, I continue down. in some of these dark areas and you'll notice I'll put in an area and then I'll take some clean water and put it next to the dark area or I'll drag a little bit of the color out of the dark area and just let it kind of work its way into the clean water or in somewhat diluted paint water and I'm just going back and forth, you'll see me throwing a little bit of that pretty saturated burnt sienna in there, just letting it build up and sort of.

Work your way into Payne's darker gray, starting to apply some of the dark tones on his back, obviously again. Payne's gray, let me see me take out some of the cleaner water and take some burnt sienna and I'll put it on the lower region of his belly. there and I just let it blend on the page with the burnt sienna and I take a little bit of the ultramarine blue and I drop it on the darkest area of ​​his back and I do it even though in the final painting it's not very obvious that it's that blue there, I think it just adds richness to any areas that are really dark and otherwise might look a little dead, so I like to add a little bit of pretty saturated color into the dark areas just to liven them up a little bit and just to have something more than that dark gray of Payne that begins to drop some shadows on his legs to define the light that comes on there. you, you, you, you, I would like to thank everyone who subscribed a long time ago. and if you're still with me and haven't banished me from your subscriptions, thank you very much for hanging in there and also thank you very much to all the new subscribers.

I was getting notifications daily that new subscribers were joining the channel and you all were little golden daggers in my side to redo them too so thanks for subscribing even though there hasn't been a new video for a while but here we go again if you guys feel like leaving a little comment in the comments about what kind of videos you like to watch, do you like watching reviews, do you like step by step demos like this, what kinds of art videos do you like to watch when you go watch videos on YouTube I continue to work on different areas of civil painting trying to bring out some dark tones and then deepening some of the mid tones.

I'm putting a pretty strong blue on his chest because I wanted white fur. have a nice bluish tone compared to all the brown fur he has so I end up rubbing it in, it's a little harsh but I'm just going in and strengthening the darks there, I'm painting his little dog mustache which I end up going back to quite a bit I think I try to darken him but only small areas like his eyes and his nose and the shadows around his ears need to be darkened a couple of times and that's pretty typical at least with In my painting I need to go back and reheat areas that I didn't get strong enough the first time. time.

It's tail. I'm just doing very dark Payne gray and then letting the burnt sienna. I'm just putting it next to the Paint the screen just letting those two blend on the page adding a couple of little shadow details under his feet and legs and just letting them and not being too detailed and like in the PAS here too just little touches of shapes and things just to suggest by sight that there are details there or things are happening, but especially in a sketch like this, I don't want to get into little details and things. I wanted this one to stay quite loose and rather.

Printing things that any kind of tight rendering. you're starting to put some very dark shapes in the background and I'm not trying to paint the background necessarily as I see it in the reference, I'm just writing I want these to be some kind of vague shapes back there and not in that real detail of what they are , you can say there's a corner, maybe a piece of furniture there, that kind of thing, but really, really, mostly, I try to frame Diego there with something. darkens and just adds a little bit of drama to the painting and some atmospheric quality with some of these washed out areas and kind of a counterbalance to the light area that's at the bottom right of the composition again.

I've dropped some ultramarine blue in there or maybe it's Prussian. I'm not sure anyway, a little bit of blue, a brighter blue in the background area there and I'm rubbing it in here too because I know I need to go back when it's dry and really sharpen the edge of his ear and the top of his head to really stand out against that background anyway, I put the blue in the background mainly to counteract the heat on his body and I was probably also seeing that this little sketch was pretty empty. a lot of color, like I said before, a lot of pepper and CNN paints gray, so I'm just adding a little more saturated color here and there to keep it away from being so duotone.

If you want to see more of my work, follow me on Instagram at Brian Ashmore Underscore Studio or on Facebook at Brian Ashmore Studio. I also have a website at www.petland.com.