On Pet Portraits...

     Any time I start work on a pet portrait, I wonder what it is that keeps me doing them, and has folks commissioning me for them on the regular. Aside from the obvious - that I love animals just as much as the people to whom these fur babies belong - I think it's just fun to play around with fur and form in a way that I can't really do with humanoids.

    I'm fairly meticulous in my other illustrative works. Every part of the rendering process for my other art projects is done with careful care and planning. My sketches go through several cycles of refinement before I even consider lining the piece. I'll line and re-line a piece a hundred times, and my color flats, shading, highlights, finishing touches all get the same level of TLC.

    And that's not to say that my pet portraits don't get equal amounts of love and attention. Quite the opposite, really, but in an entirely different way.

    There is beauty in the freeform way fur can be rendered. Rather than worry about individual wisps and clusters, I let myself scribble, for lack of a better word. I lay down flats, I airbrush in areas of different color and detail, and I stick the nose, eyes, and teeth/tongue on a separate layer.

    Then I grab a painterly brush and go to town.

    I'll sample as I go, and slap in other colors with my limited knowledge of color theory, and blend those out. (See the brown on the black dog's snout above, or the lavender on their tongues.)

    Even things like stripes and spots can be tackled with that same scribbly manner. I'm someone who doesn't often work with painterly, blended styles of art. I'm just not good at it. On a human, whose skin, muscles, and underlying bone structure demand a certain level of anatomical accuracy to avoid looking uncanny or flat, it's hard for me to nail the style.

    But with these pet portraits, all that fur lets me get away with something looser, where the nuances of blending and dapples of color only serve to amplify the organic nature of the animal.

    And hell, even the lineart lends itself well to something looser than I'm used to. I don't have to worry about (most) lines being precise and fluid. Swipes of jagged fur-like outlines are just fine and serve their purpose well here.

    So, what keeps me doing my pet portaits? It's just as fun as it is rewarding to be able to play around in a messier way on a digital canvas. And as the mother of four furbabies myself, I know full well that what I'm creating is a portrait of someone's dearly beloved familiar. That in and of itself is the highest reward there is for making these portraits.

    And hey, if you're interested in commissioning one for yourself, you can find me on Ko-Fi, or follow the links to any of my socials on my Carrd site.

With tail a'wagging,
- Lily Marlene