Project brief: Pet portraits

Because sometimes we all just need to look at some puppies 🐶

Before I dive into some cute images of animals… our baby arrived! 10 days later than her due date. She is eating, sleeping and pooping like a champion already. We are very in love with our little Hélène.

I first purchased a Wacom tablet to try out digital illustration all the way back in 2018. It was a steep learning curve to draw on the tablet but look at a screen in front of me and never really felt natural. It did give me the opportunity to start taking little commissions here and there for pet portraits, which I’d spend hours and hours delicately rendering, to then sell for $50.

I had a few friends and relatives requesting a drawing for a gift, or a memorial. One friend said ‘go nuts, make it as weird as you like’, and got this… space cats!

Eventually I upgraded to my iPad and Procreate setup, at which point it became easier and more intuitive to draw as you draw directly on the screen. However the requests for pet portraits dried up and requests for other kinds of work started coming in.

I know there are plenty of people who make their bread and butter exclusively from pet portraits. As much as I enjoy doing them, the main issue is (much like a human portrait) there’s very little room for error as one wrong line can mean the difference between a perfect portrait and one that looks nothing like the animal you’re trying to draw.

Later, after the death of a friend’s pup who was like family to me, I did a little series of sketches of the animals I’d loved and lost. Despite the messy style, it’s one of my favourite series of pet portraits. I feel like the messy style somehow manages to capture the personality of each animal even more than the realism style I used to work in.

Bit of a short one this week as I’m deep in the baby cuddles! I’ll be trying to keep to my once a week publishing schedule around all the feeds and nappy changes.

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