Monday, October 12, 2009

Painting 34 - Monsieur Puglsey


I know I haven't posted any paintings lately. But I am still managing to squeeze in some painting time in between life. I am also taking Laure Ferlita's Imaginary Trip to Paris this Fall to try to improve my non-nature watercolor sketching. This little guy is the first natural history subject I've done in the class, so thought I'd share it here. We're each working in a hand-made watercolor journal for the "trip", so with keeping a travel journal in mind, I've left room on the left of the page to write my entry.

This was a tricky piece for me to do. We had a cute photo of this dog to work from, but I wanted to add some details that set the scene - in my mind the dog was standing under a its owner's chair at a Parisian cafe, patiently waiting for a treat, but to do that I had to work from my imagination and try to guess how the light would fall on the chair legs and how the dog would realistically look standing under a chair that wasn't really there. I also wanted this to be a loose watercolor sketch, with pencil lines showing and all, but I got so caught up in the details around his eye!

Meanwhile, I'm hunkered down, craving hot soup and other cold-weather comfort foods, waiting for this cold snap to break. The snow is pretty though.

4 comments:

Katherine Kean said...

Dogs' eyes are hard to resist being drawn into and this one's adorable. Good job!

Krista Meister said...

Gabrielle, I just love this guy and your original take on him! I'm so glad we're taking Laure's class together. We're having lots of fun.

Laure Ferlita said...

Love your monsieur, Gabrielle! Well done and LOVE all the creativity that went into this!

Eve said...

This is fun seeing this and hearing how things work in the world of art.
SNOWWWW!!! YUCK!!
Have some soup for me!