Wolf was my brother’s favourite dog and they were both commended at the highest level for their work together in the Police. So I wanted to a really good study of this amazing dog, that really captured him. If you’ve looked at other pages on here my work tends towards detailed illustration, but for this I wanted something looser and more emotive.
Wolf is no longer here but over the years our family have taken lots of photos but in most of these his tongue is out as it’s a dogs radiator when they are warm and Chris and Wolf are always training. His family all commented on his lovely eyes so I thought a face portrait rather than all of him would be best. I had thought about a representational background but reverted to an abstract sombre greys to bring out the eyes and as a cue that he is no longer with us.
I used several techniques to create more expression in this work - Bigger brushes, not wearing my glasses all the time, and I usually had a beer on the go for each session! Like all artists I made mistakes doing this and I had to restart it from scratch after the background went wrong. As you can see below I started out picking out the main shadows with Payne’s grey and the highlights with a cream colour, both straight from the tube with a big hog brush for this
I am also trying to encourage my friend Roy to paint more and we both have a socially distancing beer in my outdoor studio while I explain what I am doing. I promised Roy I’d only work on it when he was here so he could see the whole process and I think this helped me to continually revaluate my work by starting each session with a careful examination of what needed improving as I wanted to encourage him to be critical of his own work rather than me making suggestions and also to show that art is essentially learning through these mistakes.
My brother has now taken delivery of the finished Wolf:
