Jasper

Jasper

I have been reading a new article about dogs dying young of cardiomyopathy when they are fed on grain-free dog food so I want to add my tuppence worth. 

First let me tell you about the portrait of Jasper above. It was done in 2011 the summer before Bryn came to live with us. It is drawn in Derwent drawing pencils in black, white and touches of other colours on grey Canson Mi-Teintes paper. I gave the portrait to Jasper’s biggest fan, my friend Annette. 

To get back to the issue of grain-free dog food: Jasper has a severe problem with both rice and corn. 

Rice gives him such bad diarrhoea that he quickly becomes severely dehydrated. Corn gives him the added symptom of blood in his diarrhoea. And no. He has no problem with gluten. He can eat wheat or rye without any trouble as long as there’s no rice or corn mixed in. 

The trouble with ordinary dog food with grain is that they don’t specify which grains are in the ingredients so Jasper has to have grain-free food to keep him safe. 

However I choose a food with a high animal protein content. 

Many grain-free foods are high in legume types of protein including beans, peas and chickpeas. I learned at school that peas don’t have all the amino acids essential for animal life in the protein. Grains have missing amino acids too but they are different ones. I remember my teacher telling me that if I eat my beans on toast I would get all the amino acids I need. 

So clearly a dog food with peas but no grain is going to leave the dog with malnutrition. 

I have to watch out though. I had been buying one brand for a while and they brought out a more expensive recipe and I bought a couple of bags. (I had 2 dogs and there was a reduction in price for buying 2 at once.) I didn’t think to check the ingredients until both Jasper and Bryn seemed less well than they were. It had a lot of pea in it. I quickly ordered the cheaper stuff and, once the dogs were well again, I admit that I added small quantities of the expensive stuff to the regular food so it wouldn’t go to waste. 

Bryn was a cross breed Irish wolfhound. Irish wolfhounds tend to have a genetic heart problem and die suddenly with no symptoms when they are about 6 years old. I think it is a form of cardiomyopathy. Well Bryn was 15 years old when she died, so clearly a grain-free dog food with high animal protein content didn’t do her any harm at all. Jasper is 11 now and you wouldn’t believe it to look at him. 

He is a bit depressed since Bryn died and is clearly looking for a new girlfriend. I am getting him a little girl puppy. I am depending on him to teach her how to make friends with everyone she meets like he does. He taught Bryn.

Work in Progress: Young Wolf

Work in Progress: Young Wolf

It is a long time since I took the photos of this young wolf. He was 6 months old at the time and absolutely delightful. I started his portrait in pastel at the time but then post polio syndrome hit me and I wasn’t able to continue. It was a few years before I recovered sufficiently to take up drawing again. 

But I have always wanted to do this portrait and have started a couple of attempts at it. Now I am determined to draw him at last. 

I am drawing him in mechanical pencil on graphic film as part of a series for an exhibition. As these drawings are small, I can draw sitting on the sofa of an evening. The only extra equipment that I need is something to quickly protect the current drawing from any cat who suddenly decides that they want to jump onto my lap. I bought a pad in a plastic folder that has 5 extra pockets to hold future drawings ready set up. 

I started this drawing a while ago. I had been using a 4B clutch pencil and, now that I have picked it up again, I see that I had made it too dark. So I have been working hard with putty rubber and the Tombow MONO zero eraser and I am happy now with the ear on the left and nearly happy with the top of his head. I drew Jasper’s portrait mainly with a 0.3 2B mechanical pencil and a 0.3 2H mechanical pencil on the “white” areas, so I am blending in the erased areas of this wolf portrait with the 0.3 2H mechanical pencil. 

The portrait of Jasper is finished but I haven’t scanned it yet. 

My last blog showed a photo of my dreadful tiling. I spent Christmas, with much appreciated help from my son, building a kitchen unit and moving furniture upstairs and downstairs. My kitchen is already working better for me though there are still problems to solve. One is the door to the unit. I found the door took up too much room when it was open and also I had trouble with the hinges. I am thinking of sawing the door in half vertically and hinging it so it will be a bifold door. 

The point of the unit is to hold the cat litter trays away from the dogs. The cats are happy with it so that is promising. The top shelf is holding the cat food and a spare bag of cat litter so it is looking promising. 

It would have been nice to start the New Year with everything organised. But it is much easier to cook my dinner in there and that is great. I was so tired of living on sandwiches!

And you can’t see how bad the tiling is. 

(See Fliss in the cardboard box rather than one of the beds! Typical cat.)

Jasper as a Puppy

Jasper as a Puppy

I have been drawing Jasper from an old photo that I took when he was a puppy. He is still as cute!

I am drawing in pencil on graphic film. I use a mechanical pencil with a 0.3 mm 2B lead so I don’t have to spend all my time sharpening a pencil. The lead that I am enjoying using these days is Uni Nano Dia Lead. It has nano-diamonds in it which make it very smooth to draw with. 

I also spend a lot of time using erasers, both kneadable ones and the Tombow MONO eraser which is a retractable eraser that is only 2.3 mms at the business end. Between the fine pencil and the small erasers I can make delicate pencil marks to suggest puppy fur. 

So far I have spent 5 hours on this portrait. Small drawings are not as quick as you might think. 

As well as drawing most days, I have been getting on with the plan for my kitchen alcove. I was expecting to start tiling last Sunday but I had to scrub a patch of black mould and leave it to dry. I didn’t want black mould trapped behind my tiles. So I did the tiling yesterday. The walls are so uneven that I am not worrying about how bad the tiling looks. Most of it will be hidden behind the unit anyway. I am capable of doing decent if not perfect tiling, but I would have had to replaster first to get the walls flat, and I don’t want to lose the time. The whole point of this is to make my kitchen more efficient so I can spend more time drawing and painting. 

The walls are uneven because this house was built back in the 1870s using sandstone from the local quarry. It is poor quality sandstone with lots of inclusions. I think it is referred to as pudding stone. The general effect is that the walls are built of rubble. There are a couple of internal walls made of lath and plaster with horsehair in it. There are the remnants of the old gas lighting if you do a bit of archaeology under the old plaster! 

So here is a photo of the alcove this morning. I have done grouting since, so it looks worse (until I clean it off).

360 degree Rotating Canvas Attachment.

360 degree Rotating Canvas Attachment

I have bought a 360 degree rotating attachment for my easel which you can see above. It took me a while to work out how to attach my reference photos close to the portrait. I was looking in all those places that one puts one’s household bits and pieces for hooks and things, and I found some Command Strips for hanging pictures. That inspired me to use them to hold a piece of plywood in place. I can clip my reference photos to it. You can see it works well. 

I think Jet wanted to get into the photo. He likes sitting on my painting table. The challenge is to keep his tail out of the wet paint. 

I knew for some time about this attachment for an easel so a canvas can be rotated. But I didn’t know if it would fit my easel. I have a rotating drawing board cum table easel that I have set up in my bedroom and I have been using it for years for drawing and painting in acrylics. However it won’t hold a canvas and there’s nowhere to set it up downstairs. 

Once my exhibition is over I have an acrylic portrait of a dog to finish. It is particularly useful to have a rotating easel for painting an animal’s fur because of hair being linear. It will be nice to paint Bentley downstairs. 

Brighteyes is nearly finished. His clothes look blotchy because it is the undercoat, and I concentrated on covering the canvas quickly. Now he is going back onto the picture shelves to dry. I have a dehumidifier working to speed it up. 

Drawing of Bryn Finished

 

Portrait Drawing of Bryn

I finished the portrait drawing of Bryn some time ago and immediately became involved in new exciting projects. And not so exciting problems to solve. So I just now posting the finished result. 

I am calling the portrait of Bryn "Elegance". I once had another dog, a crossbred boxer, who had a similar queenly demeanour. But Juno wasn't able to curl up into such a small neat space with her chin resting on her back. Bryn is such a feminine dainty soul who takes a great interest in hair styles (mine) and manicures (hers). She tells Jasper to stand in the corner while I vacuum, and she keeps the cats in order. She is 14 now and I am making the most of every day I still have her. This is why I wanted to commemorate her in this portrait. 

I worked the portrait in graphite pencil on Bristol board. I used mechanical pencils that have a good grip area for great control. But it still took me 57 hours to get that degree of detail. 

The main problem that I have to find a solution for is that I need an easel that I can sit at with my leg up on a stool because it is not yet fully healed. I have easels. I have a great one set up facing a north light but it is set up on a high table and I use it while sitting on an adjustable height stool. There is no way I can rest my leg on a stool! I have a regular studio easel which I have to stand at. The construction makes it impossible to put my leg on a stool with that one. So I spent hours online shopping for easels. I saw one I liked but it takes up a lot of floor space and my house is small. 

Then I remembered I had seen a thing to attach to the back of a drawing board to set it up on a camera tripod. Plenty of space under a tripod for a footstool. I bought that and a lightweight drawing board and I am going to use it to start my next portrait tomorrow. I will be working A3 size which is uncomfortably big for the table easel. I will be working in Acryl gouache which is a gentle medium so the camera tripod should stand up to it nicely. 

A Portrait Work in Progress

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A Posthumous Portrait Work in Progress 

I have been working on a posthumous portrait of a lady. I am drawing in coloured pencils on my favourite Canson Mi Teintes paper in aurora. 

As it is a posthumous portrait the photos that I am working from are not of the best quality but that is my forte. The first time I did a posthumous portrait was for a friend of mine, a Hindu man. His mother in law had died and the only photo they had of her was a very faded black and white one. His family members had given him the job of getting good copies of the photograph so each branch of the family could have a copy. So he asked me to try and do a portrait from it. This was back in the days before Photoshop. 

It was extremely difficult to see the features. But I did my best for my friend. 

He took a professional photograph of the portrait and sent copies to the family members and I was so surprised to get the message back that I had got a good likeness. After succeeding with that one I have the confidence to believe I can do anything! And as I say on my website, it is when your photographs are poor quality that you really need a portrait drawn or painted. 

Yawning Tiger

 

Yawning Tiger 

I finished two pen and ink drawings this last week despite being distracted by a missing cat. My very old cat got out when I wasn't paying attention properly. Perhaps I did the drawing so efficiently as a distraction to keep from worrying about the cat. He got home on Friday night but he had to be rescued from a high wall in the dark. 

The first drawing I finished was this tiger. It is pen and ink on graphic film with coloured pencil on the reverse. It is more challenging than you would think to get the right tones to show through on the right side. Graphic film is translucent but not clearly transparent. So colours are dulled, and blending one colour over another needs to be done backwards. You have to use brains more than feelings. 

To the memory of the wonderful "Sheila"

 

The last portrait of Sheila 

This is so typical of Sheila. She loved cropping grass and always carried some in her mouth. 

This drawing is pen and ink on graphic film. I got the softened look by rubbing the applied ink with either an eraser or a cotton bud depending on the effect I wanted. 

Then I strengthened the darker areas. 

I added shades of green on the reverse of the drawing in coloured pencil. 

Wolf with cubs in her den drawn in pen and ink.

I have been moving my art studio downstairs and I had buried my scanner under a heap of paper which is why I have only just been able to scan this 6 x 4 inch pen and ink drawing of a wolf with her cubs in a den under tree roots. 

I have wanted to do this subject for a long time and eventually I decided that I must do it now. It is the one subject that I would regret if I had not done it at the end of my life. Now I can look for another subject to inspire me, but first I am going to do another larger version of the wolf den in colour. 

I love working in pen and ink. I recently bought a second Platinum fountain pen to use with waterproof carbon ink. Yes these pens are designed with a cap that stops them from drying up though it is necessary to use it every day or so with the carbon ink. I bought the pen with the ultra fine nib for my small drawings. I love the feel of the pen in my hand and the delicate lines that it can produce. 

I needed fine lines and control to draw the wolf and her cubs. The cubs in particular were a huddle of legs and noses. It was difficult to sort them out. I think there are four cubs there. It may have helped if I coloured the tongues pink but I thought that would look silly. 

Work in progress: The Wolf Den

The Wolf Den work in progress 6 x 4 inches 

It may be small but there is a lot of work in this pen and ink of a wolf and her cubs in a den under tree roots. So I am showing the work in progress. 

I am drawing it behind the barricade that fends off the cat. But today he peeped round the back of the barricade to see what I was doing. I was getting ready to protect the drawing when he kind of sniffed and went back to sleep. 

I have wanted to do a drawing or painting of the wolf den for many years but I deferred it because I had commissions. Eventually that old question came up: if you knew you were going to die tomorrow, what would you regret not doing. For me the answer was so clear. I would most regret not having done this subject. 

The second thing was that I bought a new "best" pen so I bought some carbon ink cartridges for my old best pen and my hand was itching to draw with it. That is why I have started with a pen and ink of the subject. 

I have also bought an Ampersand claybord to do a painted version. But that will have to wait until the itch to use my pen stops nagging at my hand. 

Sheila's Eye

Portrait of Sheila's Eye 

I did this Conté of a mare's eye on Canson Mi Teintes paper for my own pleasure. 

Although one thinks of Conté as being a drawing medium, I think of myself as painting with it. 

I would very much appreciate comments from anyone with knowledge of horses to tell me where I have made errors with the anatomy. I must have made some errors. It is impossible to be perfect. For example, is her hair growing in the correct directions? I had to work from photos and, as she is nearly black, it was hard to see the details. 

One thing that isn't the same as the photograph, is the reflection in her eye. I would have loved to show a meadow but the reflection showed a car park (well two cars anyway). 

I hope to have an opportunity to do another horse's eye but next time with a nice decorative reflection. 

A new Wolf

I enjoy drawing wolves. They are much easier than members of the cat family because their fur is coarser. I don't know if it is really coarser. Perhaps I should compare my dogs' hair with my cats' hair under a microscope. But I can certainly get away with a rougher drawing when I do a wolf. 

This is a 6x4 inch pen and ink drawing. The tongue and eyes are coloured using Caran d'Ache Luminance coloured pencils which are lightfast. 

I am now taking a break from pen and inks to finish a series of coloured pencil studies of the horse chestnut tree through the year. I started the series last year and I have a deadline of the 23rd of October when I want to display the group of drawings at a Craft Fair I am taking part in. 

Arabian Mare

Arabian Mare in pen and ink with coloured pencil 

Here is the mother of the Arabian foal. I think it was shortly before she gave birth. 

It is drawn in pen and ink as before, with coloured pencil enhancement. The size is 4x6 inches. 

I am pleased with this one. I learned a lot while drawing the foal and I was able to avoid the mistakes I had made. 

There is something so beautiful about Arabian horses. I have another drawing to do of the mare with her foal which is so cute. 

I am looking forward to drawing it but currently I am excited about another horse I am going to draw who has such an expression as she looks at her human. I want to show it to the world and that is the true meaning of my art: to show the wonderful value of love and trust, to the world. 

A Tiger Enjoying Water

Swimming Tiger 

Here is another of my pen and ink drawings with coloured pencil background. 

I was supposed to be concentrating on pen and ink drawings of horses, but I had already started on this drawing of a tiger and I couldn't resist finishing it. 

I am still learning how to do pen and inks in the 6 x 4 inch format. I have probably got too much colour in the background here. 

I use an eraser to soften the pen marks. It can make them lighter and/or thinner and makes the drawing more subtle. Here I let the drawing dry too long and I couldn't delete the excess ink. 

I know I am telling you all too much about what is wrong with this drawing. I should pretend that it is exactly how I planned. But that is not my character. 

The original does look much better than this scan. Scans exaggerate the black pen marks. 

More Jack the lurcher

I am working hard on the portrait of Jack. I am having a bit of trouble with the photos I'm working from. His left eye was too dark to see the shape clearly. Bryn would not pose to help me, but she has prominent membranes across the inside corner of her eyes anyway. So Jasper volunteered to pose instead. I see that Jack's left eye needs a bit of adjustment tomorrow. I knew it wasn't quite right, but I couldn't decide how to fix it until I looked at the photo here.

Jack's portrait continued

Jack has an eye

Portrait of Jack, lurcher

I offered a portrait to an auction to pay towards vet bills for a rescue lurcher. This is the beginning of Jack. He has a beautiful long elegant nose, and I am concerned about portraying it well, with having a nose first angle! I have spent a lot of time playing with the image in Photoshop to get the proportions such that the elegance will be expressed at that angle. Perspective can be a challenge.