Sandy the Pug - Sketch
21 January, 2010 Filed in: Dogs
I've been commissioned to paint a portrait of Sandy - a Pug, and one of my fellow Canadians. Here's Sandy:
I'll be adjusting this photo a bit to reflect Sandy's characteristic pose and look. In my rough pose sketch, I tilted her head to the side and adjusted her legs and backside to capture the way she usually sits. I did this by using my new Photoshop skills to combine several photos of Sandy. On the left is her characteristic sitting pose, in the middle is her head tilt, and on the right is a reference photo that includes her feet, since they are cropped out of the other pictures. Isn't she cute?
In Photoshop, I combined characteristics from each photo. I selected the areas I wanted to copy, cleaned up the edges using the Magic Wand Tool, and then selected the white area around the body part. I then used the Inverse Selection command to select the body part with a transparent background. I then copied the selected area and pasted her face from the first picture and paws onto the body photo. I used the Free Transform command to scale the pasted layers to the appropriate size and angle, and then selected Merge Visible Layers to collapse the image into one layer.
Here's the sketch I made from my combination of reference photos:
As usual with my portrait sketches, this is just a rough line drawing to check the pose, so it doesn't look like Sandy yet. Now that I'm happy with the pose, I can get started on the painting. This portrait reminds me a bit of my painting of Fig Newton a few years ago.
I'll be adjusting this photo a bit to reflect Sandy's characteristic pose and look. In my rough pose sketch, I tilted her head to the side and adjusted her legs and backside to capture the way she usually sits. I did this by using my new Photoshop skills to combine several photos of Sandy. On the left is her characteristic sitting pose, in the middle is her head tilt, and on the right is a reference photo that includes her feet, since they are cropped out of the other pictures. Isn't she cute?
In Photoshop, I combined characteristics from each photo. I selected the areas I wanted to copy, cleaned up the edges using the Magic Wand Tool, and then selected the white area around the body part. I then used the Inverse Selection command to select the body part with a transparent background. I then copied the selected area and pasted her face from the first picture and paws onto the body photo. I used the Free Transform command to scale the pasted layers to the appropriate size and angle, and then selected Merge Visible Layers to collapse the image into one layer.
Here's the sketch I made from my combination of reference photos:
As usual with my portrait sketches, this is just a rough line drawing to check the pose, so it doesn't look like Sandy yet. Now that I'm happy with the pose, I can get started on the painting. This portrait reminds me a bit of my painting of Fig Newton a few years ago.
0 Comments