Sara Dunkerton Illustration and Animation: Pet Portraits

Monday, 4 March 2019

Pet Portraits - Group portrait, pt.1

Hey everyone!

Today I'm going to begin to share with you a very special Pet Portrait which I completed before the New Year!
I was commissioned by Mo to produce a large watercolour and pencil colour piece, measuring 50cm x 50cm, featuring her beloved pets; Ollie the King Charles Spaniel, Bubbles the Tortoiseshell, Bailey the Persian and Suzy the Tabby.

This commission took me quite a while to do due to the size and the complexity, not to mention I was in the process of moving whilst working on it! All the while I kept my client up to date with progress photos taken from my phone (so apologies in advance for the quality of some, the commission was just much to large for my scanner!) and I've decided to share the whole process with you here!

So this will be part 1 of a 2 part post featuring the process behind this commission!

Step 1: Photoshop mock up

After discussing Mo's idea I put together a series of rough mock ups in photoshop in order to best illustrate the concept before putting pencil to paper. This allowed me to make quick edits to the composition, colour and photographic reference until we were happy to go ahead.

Step 2 : Pencils

Next step was to draw out the grid and each of the animals.
(Again sorry for the quality of the photos!)

Step 3: Watercolour wash

Now before this step I would have liked to have stretched the paper onto an art board before applying any watercolour, this would have prevented the paper from crinkling! But I simply did not have an art board large enough to accommodate the size of this commission! So I had to be very careful to not saturate the paper too much during this and the following stage.

Step 4: Building up the Watercolour background

After applying a base wash with watercolour paint I began to build up layers of pain drips, splatters and texture to the backgrounds of each section. As before the tricky part here was preventing the paper from crinkling too much and stopping the colours of each segment overlapping!