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Wednesday 4 October 2017

The Process Of A Portrait!

So today has not started well and I'm not in the best bouncy mood so instead of doing an update I'm going to do something a little bit different! Pet portraits, especially the ratty kind are one of my most popular products so far and I love doing them so I thought I'd share a peek at the process that happens with every portrait I work on. Thank you to the rat mums who let me use their portrait as an example!

First off I give my customers a couple of roughs of their ratties to choose from or just a single rough sketch if we've discussed it more. These ratties were a pair of boys who'd sadly passed over the rainbow bridge so this was very special.
The rough sketch is very basic and just serves the purpose to give the customer an idea of poses and which rat goes where, here I have the top ear rat on the left and the dumbo on the right.
Sketches obviously evolve as you'll see further down but this is the first step, drawn in to my little green commissions book as a tiny little thumb nail.
I kinda like having them all together as I can look through and see the commissions I've worked on over the past few months.



Once the customer is happy with the sketch I then start work on the final sketch, working on it so that the pencil lines are fairly light. I use a 4H pencil for this to keep things fairly faded.
This was a gift so I tended to hide a lot pf progress shots just in case!


Once the sketch is done I'll then send it to the customer to make sure that they're happy with their portrait. I constantly check this to make sure I'm getting things right. All pets are so individual so I like to make sure I get the smaller details perfect.
I'll then work on the colours using winsor and newton watercolours and inks along with faber-castell pencils, these two were fairly white rats so there was a lot of pale shading to do to make them look 3D. 
The customer also wanted their names and a rainbow background (I hadn't drawn a rainbow since I was a kid so this made me super excited!) So I got the rainbow ark added and penciled in the names, again checking this was okay with the customer.


And finally I got the background painted and the names inked in before adding a small amount of shading under the rats themselves. This has probably been one of my favourite commissions lately as it's had so much meaning and has been so colourful. It really has felt like a bright remembrance of these two boys who meant so much to their owners.


If you're interested in a pet commission from me I work on any pet (I like a challenge!) and do both A5 and A4 sizes.
Prices start at £25.00 for A5 and £35.00 for A4.
You can find the listings for these over on my Etsy shop here 

If you're interested in a commission for Christmas please do make your order within the next couple of months to guarantee delivery in time, especially for anyone out of the UK.

Thanks for reading! 

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