Dog

You may wish to include the Calligraphy for Dog (gǒu) in your painting which can be found on our Zodiac Animals pages.

For information on Dog personality traits, take a look at the Chinese Zodiac Dog page on the Travel China site.

I was looking at work from 2018 workshops and came across a quick landscape which I had demonstrated in February 2018. This was nothing to do with animals as I have it down as a ‘back to basics with Trees’ workshop. However, you might be interested in the development of the composition which started very simply as two islands:

Two islands by Paul Maslowski 2018

Waiting for his master - detail - by Paul Maslowski 2018

It was a quick demonstration of a couple of bare trees on two very small islands using loose traditional techniques.

From that start I added shading to the trees and the islands as well as to the water. This in particular is a more contemporary way of painting. The painting is, therefore, a mix of traditional and contemporary...

I also added a distant lake edge as well as the fisherman.

This was a challenge piece to take a demo and turn it into a composition. I could have stopped here, and although this tells us a certain tale, I wanted to expand a bit more of the story which led to the title change…

I started by adding the dog in the bottom right hand corner which gave a diagonal composition.

It then seemed the right thing to add land so that the dog was waiting on the shore for his master. This seemed a bit bare so some darker details were added to key the front of the painting. It still seemed bare so as this is definitely a winter painting some dying water reeds were added in.

There was a lot of white in the whole picture so it became clear that I needed to do something about the sky as I did not want to add any detail to the far shore. I don’t think it is particularly clear in the photo but the sky was swiftly filled with a blue-grey wash.

Last to go in was the Calligraphy. First, the year, 2018 followed by my signature with a space for our Double Happiness studio seal…

If you have attended workshops with us which ended in totally different compositions from the tree island start, or you have stayed with a landscape it would be great to see what you have done…

Waiting for his master by Paul Maslowski 2018

Dogs Grass Bowl and Ball by Kim Ashburner 2021

For one of our LCBP Challenger sessions, Kim produced this painting which I wanted to include for the Year of the Dog.

Kim had been wanting to paint a picture of her two ‘granddogs’, Sully and Buzz, for quite a while.

She used this opportunity to paint them at play and has really captured both their characters. She included their bowls and some grass for the remaining elements. We love the use of ink only which gives a real immediacy to the action and imbues this painting with qi...

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