Pet Portraits Commission Information
Portrait: 'Duncan and Wilson' with Graded Background.
Size & Medium: 16 x 12 Oils on Cotton Canvas.
Commissioned from: USA.
Brooks commissioned me to paint his beautiful Italian Spinones in 2009 and one of the first emails Brooks sent is pasted word for word below. I felt this email gave me a bit of an insight into how people view our work and website.....
....when I reviewed the paintings in your gallery, I noticed that all are portraits and all, but a couple, are full frontal face shots. No surprise there. After all it is called petPORTRATartist! As you know, with a portrait, the emotion and ‘feeling’ of the painting is often limited to those that have intimate knowledge and memories of the subject (person or pet). Of course, there are certainly some portraits that convey emotion and feeling to those who do not know the subject, but that is far more difficult to achieve. In looking over your work however, I felt that you had, in some cases, transcended the photograph and gave me a sense for the dog behind the face.
I visited a number of pet portrait painting sites, before settling on yours because of this. In reviewing the work of other artists, I saw a lot of nice pictures, some that matched the photograph with near perfection. But I can get a photograph blown up with varnish ‘painted’ over the top, if that’s what I want. I know that this one will be much more challenging for you (and hopefully, satisfying) as you cannot rely upon success as measured with, for example, getting the eye color just right but rather you need to somehow convey the emotions of the scene. The sense of togetherness, of trust and support, the essence of brothers together, side by side, since birth. I recognize the inherent challenge in am confident that I chose wisely.
Brooks.
Brooks wanted Duncan and Wilson to be painted just as they were in the photo, looking into the distance, but as you can read above, for me to give feeling and something a little extra to the piece. I think I ahve acheved Brooks brief well and you can see the refernce photo, stages of the portrait along with a final scan and detail below. Also some more words from Brooks. I hope you enjoy this page of information and if you would like to commission us to paint your pet don't hesitate to email us at any time.
The Pet Portrait in Progress
We try to make sure we take a number of photos of the portrait during the day and display them on our portraits in progress blog for our clients to see. We have daylight easel lamps which allow us to see the painting in pure natural light, and sometimes this lighting effect the photos that we take. This can account for colour differences between each stage and the final scan below.
The Oil Painting with Detail
We scan the majority of our artwork here in the studio, we have an epson scanner, or for the very large paintings we take photographs of the artwork using a Sony DSLR camera, a tripod and two diffused photography lights. Our scans and photographs are always perfect quality if clients require giclee prints of their hand painted portrait for friends or family.
 
Client Pet Portraits Reference Photos
Our clients email a range of photographs for us to work with, we use one for the main pose of the portrait and others for detail, backgrounds etc The photographs depicted below may vary in colour to the finished painting above. This can be due to the scanned oil painting being slightly different to the original or often clients give us more than one photo to work from i.e. one for the pose and another for colouring.
Client Comments and Feedback
We are always thrilled to read our clients emails, we are in touch with clients via email and sometimes via telephone, skype and texts throughout the entire process. Clients also leave us messages on our portraits in progress blog when they are watching their portrait in progress and also comment on our facebook page too. We try to add snippets of their emails here for you to read, plus you can see more photos of happy clients with the portraits in our client feedback section too.
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Melanie - First, I am thrilled by the painting. As you said, this really more a portrait than a painting. I must admit to mixed emotions when I look at it, given the quick, unexpected and early death of Wilson to AHA. However, while my emotions may start with sadness, it soon turns into a smile thinking about all the good times and his sweet personality. I don’t know that you ever get over it completely, it’s just that the memories evoke more smiles faster as time goes by.
I really can’t wait to see Carol’s face when she sees the picture. I’ve got a feeling it will invoke a bit on emotion for her a well. There was a basketball coach here in the US, someone you’ve probably never heard of (after all we don’t even play the proper football). His name was Jim Valvano and he had cancer while still in his prime. He was very successful and popular and before he died, they started a cancer research fund (Jimmy V fund) in his honor. ESPN televised an event establishing the fund and it was one of Valvano’s last public appearances. One of the things he said was: ““To me, there are three things we all should do every day. We should do this every day of our lives. Number one is laugh. You should laugh every day. Number two is think. You should spend some time in thought. And number three is, you should have your emotions moved to tears, could be happiness or joy. But think about it. If you laugh, you think, and you cry, that's a full day. That's a heck of a day. You do that seven days a week, you're going to have something special.” I have a feeling your painting will cover her for 1 and 3.
Once we get the painting framed, I’ll be sure to send you a picture (may take awhile as I suspect Carol will be looking for the perfect antique frame) Thanks again for sharing your artistic talent… I suspect there may be a PBGV in your future
Brooks |
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