The Artist's Challenge Maintaining Attention of Dogs

Looking at both animal portrait painting and human portraiture, you would see that they are quite the same save for the fact that animals don't like to pose. It requires real work on the part of the artist to maintain an animal's attention. This is the specialization of one female artist from Wilmington. She is one of those who belong to the Delaware family tree. Her grandfather is a painter who created a collection of sea and landscape paintings which became famous. It's no shocker that by age 3, this female artist was already painting.

Animals dominated most of the drawings she made. It was at the age of 10 that she had her first show and at age 12 when she began making illustration for children's books. Thanks to her famous Philadelphia teachers, she became acquainted with the world of dance. She did solo performances in dance for a long time and was even known for a very convincing death portrayal in one of her dances.

In painting, dogs are her main interest, although she does portraits of many kinds of animals. When you see the way she start work on a dog's portrait, you can't help but feel interested. She sketches as much as she can while the dog's owner holds the dog still.

As she looks for the best pose that would suit the dog, her pencil just continues to fly over the sketchpad with amazing speed. She talks to the dog and compliments him while she is doing this. She uses props to continuously hold the animal's attention and keep him interested. She asks the owner for photos and makes a request to make copies of these photos for her collection. Snips from the ears, tail, and tummy are collected from the dog so that she can determine the colors to use. For every dog, there are snips that she files.

The next thing she focuses on is the selection of the pose and the composition with the best background possible. The type of dog or animal determines the latter. She actually decided on sitting in a duck blind to make the sketches for the background of a Chesapeake Bay retriever portrait.

She says that animals, just like people, can pass on judgment. One case that proves this is the American pointer who destroyed the worst painting of one artist who was sketching him. He had to get large doses of medicine for that reaction toward the painting, so it must have been a really bad one.

For a portrait that either shows a beagle or a basset, she puts in a paw print to blend with the scenery and adds on the back the kennel club's identifying symbols. Her own dog helped in even creating abstract backgrounds. Cooperation is not something animals frequently show. She had an experience where she had to stop portrait painting for the day since one of the models ran off with a female. Natural this may be, but it would seem that the unusual can always be expected when painting an animal's portrait.

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