Meet Trixie and Rosa Marie

Their human dad commissioned this 16×20 colored pencil illustration for their human mom’s birthday! #Relationshipgoals much? These two fluff balls were so much fun to illustrate on colored pencils, especially with my new polychromos Faber Castell pencils. I’ll have to write another blog about what I discovered with these miracle sticks vs. other pencils I’ve used in the past.

From snaggle tooth to adorable curls, I had so, so, so much fun creating this one. It makes me so excited for future colored pencil work!

Challenges

The hardest part of this was that it was time management since this was a rush order! I wanted to make sure it was done in time and arrived on the date of her birthday, not a day late. My process usually allows me to juggle multiple commissions at once, but since this was time sensitive I had to put a pause on other commissions, with client approval of course. What a great reminder that all the clients I work with have been just incredible human beings with such big, loving hearts. 🙂

Another challenge I had with the actual making of the portrait was curls. Curls on curls on curls! Shag on shag on shaggity shags. I had to do multiple triple checks to make sure these fur babies had the right amount of fluff in the right places. Lesson here is that I’ll be taking more time on the sketching process in the future to make sure I map out a lot more than I did before!!

Favorite Part of the Process

Those who know me “nose” I am a sucker for the snoot! I LOVE doing these two puppers’ noses! They were so different in that one was big and round with warm tints whereas the other was small and had cool tints. The color mixing in these snoots was SO much fun!

I know this was a challenge, but it was also a favorite part of the process– the fur! Hahahaha. As much grief it might have caused, it also was so rewarding whenever I got it right. 🙂

All in all..

I finished this piece feeling really proud. As an artist, we’re hardest on ourselves. There’s a million things we want to do better, could have fixed, would have fixed, etc. And though that isn’t different with this piece, I finished it feeling like I did give it my all. The joy it brought to other cafe regulars/strangers/friends/family confirms that this is a fulfilling career. I get to work with people’s love of animals. What. A. Blessing.

Best,
Sheila