I knew this would be a complicated painting with a lot of little elements that I wanted to add, and it would be very difficult to set up this whole scene and pose Duke in front of it just to take the reference photo for the portrait. Instead, I took some photos of Duke sleeping, in his regular bed, and I used the photo-editing program Photoshop on my computer to play with different compositions and choose the best combination of tree, presents and pose. I've done this before with rough sketches and magazine cutouts, but the advantage of doing it on the computer is that you can resize and move things easily. I tried making Duke larger or smaller relative to the tree to see how it would look.

Here are some of the prototypes I made in Photoshop, pasting in Duke's picture:

I decided on the first pose, with Duke moved to the right and a log cabin wall in the background.

I painted Duke in, then filled in the basic colors of the wall and the tree. I painted in the presents one at a time, choosing colors and shapes that would provide a nice backdrop for Duke without looking too cluttered. I added decorations to the tree until it looked finished, keeping the focus on Duke. In the final picture, you can see where I added one more present in the middle to break up the flat line in the composition and frame Duke more clearly.

Working on stretched canvas, I always choose back-stapled or spline-fitted canvas, so that the edges of the painting are smooth and the painting can be hung without a frame. At the end of each painting, I usually either paint the edges black, or paint them to match the canvas. This time I decided to have fun with the log cabin theme and painted the wood grain onto the logs at the edges. It's a detail that won't show up on the Christmas cards, but makes the original painting more unique:

Tags: labrador, techniques, photoshop, finished, christmas, combining photos