Animal Portraits

Queen from the Humane
Society of Tacoma and
Pierce County

Learning to paint a portrait of an animal is much easier than you'd think. All it takes is practice. The eyes are the most important feature to get right, along with capturing the facial expression. No matter what the subject, most artists will begin their painting with a sketch.

For our Paws with Cause portraits of shelter animals, we start with a photo of the potential adoptee. Sometimes the photo will include the whole body. I personally prefer more of a close-up view. We sketch the animal onto a blank (8X10) canvas using permanent marker. 

My Traced Sketch of Queen

Once you're satisfied with the sketch, we often suggest going over the lines using puff paint to preserve a tactile feel to help seniors stay within the lines, especially if eyesight is an issue. Whether at our Sit-Stay-and-Paint parties or leisurely painting at home each canvas already comes pre-sketched.

My Sketch of Bo

Bo from Forgotten
Dogs Rescue

Some painters may find it easier to start with the background. Others may jump right in and work on the facial features. It really doesn't matter where you start. Using acrylic paint allows you to build up layers as you go. Don't worry about making a mistake; the paint dries quickly and can be easily touched up later.

Many experienced artists use their sketch to define the proportions and placement within the rectangle. Some painters may depend more upon the lines as guides. Remember that the face is the most important part. In my painting, I will keep Bo's teal harness but edit out the orange leash.

Another approach is to consider painting within the areas defined by the lines that have been drawn. If you work in a small area at a time, then the areas encapsulated by the lines become areas of colored shapes. Don't forget that the printed photo is always there to reference for those details that may now be covered up with color.

Once the initial layers have been established it's time to begin to add textural details such as fur, shading, and highlights to give your portrait dimension (such detail may spill over into the background). I tend to spend most of my time on the subject and less time on the background. With watercolors, I like to wash over larger areas with diluted colors with the intention of going back later with more saturated colors.

Perhaps you started your painting with a solid color in the background (be sure to mix enough of the base hue). If so, then this would be the time to make it more interesting and fun. That's totally up to you! I chose to finish with a beachy background for my portrait of Bo. Our family dogs love frolicking on the beach. Though most beaches don't allow dogs to be off-leash, My daughter takes her dog to a waterfront off-leash dog park in Edmonds, Washington.

Here's a watercolor painting I did of three dogs at the Palm Springs Dog Park. On the left is a printout of the photo I took. And on the right is the finished painting.

Here is what it looked like partway through the process. You can see my light brown colored pencil lines in the sketch. After washes and layers of watercolor paint, my lines could no longer be seen.

Athenaeum (1795),
from the Smithsonian
National Gallery

An Allegory of
Virtue

While on a trip to the UK in 2017, we visited the Scottish National Gallery. Hanging there was this unfinished painting by an unknown artist. Everything but the central figure was painted first, including the background. Such studies are for an artist's own use and not intended to be displayed. One such artist is American portrait artist, Gilbert Stuart, who used an unfinished portrait of George Washington (“Athenaeum”) as the model for all future portraits of our first President. He used it as the basis for his engraving on the one dollar bill.

Sketching an image on a pumpkin is a little more challenging. It is important to clean the outside of your pumpkin before sketching. I've never used carbon paper for this. Some people print out a pattern and poke tiny holes along the outlines. Permanent marker works best, and don't be afraid that you will see the lines after carving because the pumpkin will sweat during carving. I use soapy water or Windex to remove more stubborn marks.

For pumpkin carving, you will need to decide upon the positive-negative space. Decide what is to be cut away (showing the light) and what is left behind (the dark skin). If you want a middle ground (gray tone) then you will need to peel the skin to the desired depth for just the right glow. This also works well for skulls. When peeled the face shows up in daylight and becomes creepier at night.

For my Husky pumpkins, I did a really challenging one with a Washington 'W' in the background. I love how the bright spot of the candle made the husky's face look white! Admittedly, there is also a toothpick to attach the floating eye.

This year I found a much easier design online that uses simple cutouts. I intend to use blue translucent pony beads for the eyes. Notice how much more 3D the dog looks with the head turned at a slight angle. The important thing to remember when taking away the flesh is to be mindful of the structure of what's left behind. We need to balance the positive and negative space in our design. I can already see that the left side of the snout is going to be a problem!

I decided to use one of the smaller pumpkins that we grew in our garden this year, since I intend to use this design for my online class. The entire back side of this gourd was rotten, so I decided to gut it from the back, leaving a large opening. Later, I performed a repair using the back of another small pumpkin, just like Dr. Frankenstein would have done (never done this before). As you can see, I had to resort to a toothpick to support the snout!

When I did the raven pumpkin with the large moon in the background, I had to support the head and beak with a toothpick because of shrinkage as the pumpkin began to dry out and rot. So don't carve those jack-o-lanterns too early!

On Halloween day at the Everett Farmers Market, I will be demonstrating pup-kin carving. Alas, they aren't shelter animals that Paws with Cause supports, although they show many of the techniques required to do an animal portrait on a pumpkin. There will be lots of scraping. Luckily, I purchased a set of linoleum block printing cutters from Amazon!

Art Inside and Outside the Ballpark

Portrait within Seattle Times Pic

The Seattle Mariners

In honor of a great season of Seattle Mariners baseball I am posting about the artwork inside and outside of T-Mobile Park. As game #162 could be the last time we see third-baseman Kyle Seager play baseball as a Mariner, let's take another look at his portrait painted by artist Jeff "Weirdo" Jacobson for the 2018 Mariners Care Auction. I actually pasted the portrait inside 3rd base in a recent photo from the Seattle Times. Taking away 3rd base is hardly consolation for 10 years of Mariners baseball, though hopefully it means something to him and his family.

Edgar (2021), Lou Cella

Outside the park there is the newly installed statue of HOFer Edgar Martinez. It joins the one at the main entrance to T-Mobile Park dedicated to Ken Griffey Jr. Let's also not forget The Mitt, by Gerald Tsutakawa. These and others also appear in my recent post entitled, Edgar Statue, HOFers Murals, and Other Ballpark Art. I took this image from the Seattle Times and cropped it to use on my phone's lock screen. The tarp makes it look like the figure is emerging from a block of stone.

Other Large Art Installations

I also love all of the steel cutout figures of player silhouettes attached to the gates and fences around the outside of the stadium. One of our neighborhood playing fields has been decorated with figures representing multiple sports. My favorite has to be the fences and gates surrounding the city dog park in Palm Springs, CA. Dog faces and figures are actually incorporated into the structure created by sculptor Phill Evans.

Neon scribbles by Cerith Wyn Evans

I appreciate the large installations like the The Tempest that hangs in the main concourse at the Home Plate Gate. The centerpiece of the rotunda includes translucent baseball bats "molded of resin and mounted on brushed aluminum spiraling forms". See the Art-in-the-Park link at the top of this post. I am equally impressed when I find other modern installations like the neon light sculpture hanging in London's Tate Britain entrance.

Entrance to Vigeland Sculpture Park, Oslo

I'm not going to show the nude male figures sculpted in wrought iron on one of the gates in Oslo, Norway's Vigeland Sculpture Park. However, I certainly can show the intricate park entrance. Not a baseball park, but equally impressive iron work and tons of sculptures inside the park!

Brandenburg Gate w/ Quadriga, J.G. Schadow

Speaking of gates, the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin, Germany is also impressive. We luckily got to visit it while on our cruise to seven countries (including Norway) along the Baltic Sea. Atop the structure you can see the sculpture by Johann Gottfried Schadow. Quadriga is a chariot drawn by four horses and driven by Victoria, the Roman goddess of victory. How 'bout that Mariners victory against the A's on 27 September! They actually beat Oakland 12 games in a row.

More Baseball Tributes

Cal Ripken in Wax

While visiting the Baseball HOF in Cooperstown, NY in July 2019 for the induction of Edgar Martinez, we saw lots of great baseball art. Here in the doorway of the Heroes of Baseball Wax Museum is a figure of Cal Ripken. We didn't actually go inside the museum and I am certain there was much more art to be seen outside of the HOF itself and in the surrounding town. Maybe someday there will be a similar tribute to Kyle Seager!

Babe Ruth & Ted Williams, Baseball HOF

My favorite sculpture inside the HOF is the side-by-side life-size basswood figures of Babe Ruth and Ted Williams. The artist, Armand LaMontagene, hit this one out of the park!

Babe & Ted

Closeup of Ted & Babe

Gehrig, Robinson, and Clemente

These three HOF celebrities -- Lou Gehrig, Jackie Robinson, and Roberto Clemente -- were immortalized together inside the hall in 2008 with bronze statues by sculptor, Stanley Bleifeld.

Kyle Seager has been deservedly nominated  for the 2021 Roberto Clemente Award.

Art Project Revisited

Now that I'm engaging adults in online art classes, I am revamping some of my favorite lesson plans and adapting them for all ages. The challenge is to be able to complete the project in less than one hour using only supplies that people would typically have around the house. So far, it's worked out fine, and as usual, my students are adapting their art to make it personal and to make use of what they have available to them.

This is my new and improved sample for our recent project on balanced compositions, which was inspired by Joan Miró.

My friend and organizer of these contemplative workshops did such an amazing job on her Miró composition that I have to share it here. Here is the artists' own interpretation:

"The turquoise pieces are the things in my life that are working well. The big yellow geometric piece is like a messy monster that represents some more chaotic and uncertain areas of my life right now. I love seeing the pieces laid out on the paper together like a map. It really shows how things are working."

"After playing with all the pieces I had a big, ”Aha!”: Balance is when the messy monster is not any bigger than the turquoise calm in my life. The messiness doesn’t have to go away completely, but it shouldn’t overpower the whole operation."

And my comments: I love the smaller patterned pieces that maybe have some of the messy bits but are overcoming the chaos to become a worthwhile, positive outcome. The Miro touches are awesome! They provide emphasis (asterisk), connections or decision points (ellipsis dot-to-dot), and gratitude (the spirals). My own first example for my 5th-graders also used the more pleasing pastel versions of the three primary colors. Pastels may indicate that you are maintaining calmness. Funny how the cooler color is your favorite! The outlining is also a very classy touch and it makes the shapes pop against the neutral background.

This Miró example is actually a great segue to our next project in which we will create patterns using repeated shapes. The spiral will again make an appearance, but the star of the show will be the heart shape:

The theme of this Circle of Love sponsored project is gratitude, often symbolized by a short, g-shaped spiral and the color pink. I decided to resurrect one of my 3rd-grade projects that employs a heart-shaped cutout. My artists will trace the heart shape repeatedly, allowing overlap to create other shapes, forming either regular of random patterns. Students will have the option of using watercolor paint or markers.

Did you know that Vincent Van Gogh considered his Sunflowers paintings to be about gratitude? He also used the spiral shape in the sky of his Starry Night painting. Another artist who was obsessed with the spiral was Surrealist Salvador Dali, who found the shape of a rhinoceros' horn to be that of a perfect logarithmic spiral. He was inspired by Leonardo da Vinci and Albrecht Dürer. Spirals are also present in nature in seashells and sunflowers, though I never really stopped to look at how the seeds were arranged. Besides, they are much more tightly spun than the traditional mathematical spiral.

Don't forget about the golden ratio and the Fibonacci Spiral, present in both da Vinci's Mona Lisa and Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring (a.k.a. 'Mona Lisa of the North'). I blogged about them both in my Mona Lisa post from February of last year.

As a child, I recall being fascinated by the geometric toy Spirograph (1967), and we would spend hours drawing patterns using different color pens by rotating circular gears inside or outside similarly cogged ring-shaped wheels. Dürer's polygons are captured in a paper by G.H. Hughes entitled, The Polygons of Albrecht Dürer -1525. It gives the mathematical basis for the shapes one may produce with a Spirograph.

Illustration by Budi Satria Kwan

So, why the spiral for gratitude? Well, it loosely resembles a lowercase 'g'. Apparently, the spiral also represents spiritual growth evolving from something small and becoming something logarithmically greater. I look at it as the little things that you do, like being grateful internally or externally, that amount to much more good for your own spiritual health and the well being of others.

Gratitude is learned and knowledge is wisdom.

Edgar Statue, HOFers Murals, and Other Ballpark Art

HOFers Mural (2020), 'Weirdo'

Walter Jones, Jack Sikma and Edgar Martinez have been immortalized in a SOHO mural located on 1st Ave South in Seattle, about a block south of T-Mobile Park, and painted by local artist, Jeff Jacobson, a.k.a. 'Weirdo'. On our way to a Mariners baseball game we spotted the spectacular Edgar mural painted on a textured wall covered with small stones. What a surface to paint on! I love the colors and the faint outline of #11 in the middle layer.

Kyle Seager portrait (2018), 'Weirdo'

Weirdo also painted a portrait of 3rd baseman Kyle Seager during Mariners Care Charity Night in June 2018 that sold for a final bid of $2,600.

New Statue at T-Mobile Park (2021)

Then we walked to T-Mobile Park and took plenty of pictures of the new statue of slugger and Baseball HOFer Martinez, sculpted by Chicago-based artist Lou Cella,  and just down the street from his Ken Griffey Jr. statue.

Ken Griffey Jr. Statue (2017)

Dave Niehaus Statue (2011), Lou Cella

Cella is also the artist responsible for the tribute to late sportscaster, Dave Niehaus that sits inside the ballpark. Fans can sit next to Dave for a photo op and take home a great souvenir of their ballpark experience.

The Mitt (1999), Gerry Tsutakawa

On the left field (north) side of T-Mobile Park (once Safeco Field) is The Mitt, a bronze sculpture by Gerry Tsutakawa, son of local fountain artist George Tsutakawa. It's a great example of positive-negative space with its cutout representing the baseball.

The Ascent (1950), George Tsutakawa

While at SAM the morning of the baseball game we spotted two of George Tsutakawa's early paintings. Though known for his sculptures, George Tsutakawa was initially trained as a painter. Here, in these two paintings, he combines Japanese calligraphy with American Modernism. 

The Descent (1950), G. Tsutakawa

I am always pleased to find such gems on my visits to the art museum. The compositions are very much the same, like many abstract works often are, although more representational than most. I like the color scheme and his playful use of line. Diagonal lines create the switchbacks characteristic of mountain trails. The smaller details are reminiscent of embellishments that Joan Miró would have added to his paintings.

SAM Visit -- Monet at Étretat

The Cliffs At Étretat (1885), Monet

My daughter and I had tickets to an afternoon Mariners baseball game at T-Mobile Park. We spent the morning visiting the Seattle Art Museum and its Monet at Étretat exhibit. As you know, Monet often became fixated on a particular motif such as is evident by his many paintings of haystacks. In July of this year I posted about Impressionists' use of The Color Purple, Violet or Lilac in Art. Monet appears in >10 of my blog posts.

Fishing Boats (1885), Monet

Prior to his 1890 haystacks series, and in two separate visits to the Normandy Coast, he spent his time painting seaside landscapes along the English Channel. His main subjects were Manne-Porte arch and the cliffs at Étretat (above) and fishing boats. 

Boats on the Beach at Étretat (1885), Monet

I like how this painting of boats shows outbuildings (cabanas?) shaped like haystacks. It makes me wonder if they left an impression on his mind that lead to his later fascination with that shape.

Cliffs of the Porte d'Aval (1885), Monet

This popular vacation spot in France reminds me of our March 2019 trip to the Channel Islands off the coast of California and our boat trip and hike on Santa Cruz Island.

Santa Cruz Island off Ventura, CA

Coastal Location of Étretat

Santa Cruz Island (inbound from boat), March 2019

Luckily I had my cellphone and captured many beautiful shots. Too bad I didn't have my portable easel to paint en plein air. Notice the small slit (arch) in the rock (lower right).

One of my friends also pointed out the arch at Cabo San Lucas, which was one of the stops on our cruise to Mexico. Here is a great picture courtesy of Mike Raabe and fineartamerica.com.

La Falaise et la Porte d'Aval (1883), Monet

All of the above Monet landscapes are from his second trip to Normandy in 1885. Here is one from his first trip there in 1883. While I enjoy the atmospheric effects of the surrounding water and sky, the cliff (la falaise) seems rather flat and unaffected (maybe in silhouette?). The dark outline of the cliff creates a line of tension for me. The texture of Monet's cliff also seems more impressionistic in color and texture than the rest of his painting. Up close you can see bits of red.

Washerwomen on the Beach of Étretat (1894), Boudin

Also on display were paintings by Monet's first teacher, Eugène Boudin. The subject figures in the foreground accentuate the relative height of the cliff. Apparently, the artist was capturing a common occurrence while painting en plein air. It's almost like two paintings.

Scratch Paintings with Seniors at Old Friends Club

There was so much to see at the art museum besides the works of Monet and others. The paper cutouts  in The Geography of Innocence exhibit by Barbara Earl Thomas are amazing! Her use of light, colored glass, and intricate paper cutouts creates unusual portraits in both color and black-and-white. Her work also fills entire rooms and walls of gallery areas. The multicolor portraits overlay black paper with cutouts that allow the backlit painted glass to shine through. It reminds me of the scratch paper we used as kids where we used a wooden stylus to etch designs and reveal the colors beneath.

Walkabout Exhibit at SAM

Australian Aboriginal artist Dorothy Napangardi uses dots to create beautiful abstract paintings that will blow you away. Her Walkabout: The Work of Dorothy Napangardi is a new and ongoing exhibit at SAM.

One final note: these Kwottenal Kanye earrings, worn by the women of Fulani, captured our eyes because we made our own fortune cookie versions for one of my daughter's second-grade projects about African women's jewelry. I recall that we also used Sugar Corn Pops cereal for a necklace. We both get excited when we see something that sparks old memories. I remember back in 2011 during our France/Italy trip when she found a Rembrandt painting hidden in one of the museum hallways. And I still get jazzed when I find an obscure Van Gogh painting that I haven't seen before.