Sustained Investigation #4

Charlie

10.5" x 6"

The story behind this piece is about the dog and what he/she is eating. He/she is licking their chops from whatever he/she ate for breakfast. Which leaves you questioning about what he/she ate for breakfast. Was it good? Was it not so good? This project relates to my life because this dog is actually my dog. I took this picture a long time ago but I really loved how it captured his tongue perfectly.

I made this work on canvas paper with acrylic paint. I first started by transporting the size of the picture to the size of the paper by using a ruler and 6H graphite pencil. Which was actually quite hard to do. I then graphed the photo in inches and the canvas in inches and taped up the border of the canvas paper so as not to make a mess on it. I then sketched out the picture using the graphing method and finally when i was done with that, I painted it.

I shaded in this piece adding highlights and shadows and adding values with lights and darks. I grouped uo the dark parts of his hair and the light parts of his hair and I then painted them separately. I was going to add little peanut butter jars in the background but I decided not to because I liked it the way it was, and I thought if I did do that, that it might be distracting from the main focus. In the future if I do this again, I think I might add something more in the background to add more to the piece.