Canaan Dog Portrait.

Greetings Readers,
            I hope you all had a good Xmas/New Year and have recovered form the excesses of too much food,booze and telly ? Where 2011 went I shall never know, time just seems to fly by these days, or perhaps it is because I am getting older and less inclined to worry about it !

       This is Chefa that I worked on about a month ago, and the breed is a Canaan Dog, one that I had not seen before at the dog shows, therefore not knowing much about them all. There is a quirky little story behind this, because I had already met this dogs owner before some years ago at another show where she had been with her other two dogs, a pug cross called Darcy and another Cannan called Megan. She kindly allowed me to take some photos of them and they did come out really well, and as I always do I uploaded them to the computer and burnt them to disc for reference. However I do keep some of the better ones on my desktop that I think will make good pictures and one of these was Darcy, who was quite striking with his big brown soulful eyes. It was him I recognised straight away as he strolled into a dog show earlier this year with his owner in tow looking very laid back and cool ! It was great to watch the show and have a chin wag, plus take some more pics of Mr Darcy.

On to Chefa, the one thing that struck me mostly about this dog was how much like a fox she is in colour and the shape of those ears, very upright and pointy. I always start with the eyes, almond shape for this breed, working left to right building colour by layers, however if the eyes do not come right first time I tend to bin it and start again.  I know I have said this before many times on previous posts and will probably continue saying it, but they are "the windows to the soul" the centrepiece of the whole portrait, getting them right is very important to me. I used a mixture of polychromos and prismas pencils in the following
                                                         colours.
                                                               
                                                                 For the Eyes, burnt ochre, yellow ochre, burnt sienna, and
burnt umber with some black
 For the Fur, A base colour of yellow ochre and jasmine, and then built up with burnt ochre, cinnamon,peach beige, burnt sienna, terracotta and burnt umber.
 The nose and mouth area were done using equal amounts of black cherry, burnt umber and some black. As a rule I don't like to use black on its own for the very dark parts so will mix it with other dark shades like black cherry/grape, chocolate,
burnt umber and sepia. At other times I might use indigo blue,tuscan red or any other very dark colour that will give that depth of tone without appearing too dense.
 As always there is a range of greys used and I particularly I like french greys from prismas, the cold greys from polychromos and one of my long standing favourites blue grey from derwents artist pencils. However as I go along I might add in some random colours too, which will add that little extra something.
 Below is the finished picture which I was really pleased with and another first time breed drawing to add to my list.