How to Draw a Dog 🐶 Pastel Pet Portrait Tutorial

To create this pet portrait I'm using a selection of pastel pencils on Clairefontaine pastel matte. You don't have to use these materials but they are my preferred and I will list them for you down below. I always start with the eye when it comes to a pet portrait. The eye is ultimately the key to the soul and it does bring your portrait to life but from a theory point of view it's incredibly important. We have our darkest darks as you can see with the black And then the lightest lights with your reflection. find that it really helps to set up the tonal balance for the rest of your piece so I would really encourage you to start with the eyes if you can. Now for the second eye that I was just working on there it is mainly in shadow and you can see that I haven't tried to pull it forward I'm working with the reference photo and I'm really going to lean into that shadow later and later on I'm going to show you some great little tricks for how you can make your shadows much more interesting and make your whole painting more dynamic. Now, for this piece, the nose was actually a key part. Usually, the eyes take centre stage, but for this one in particular, the nose needs to come right forward and catch loads of light. So, what I do is create a lovely, smooth underpainting to begin with and make sure that all of the different blacks and greys are gently... Transition together and then over the top of this I can go in as you can see with my details and I actually touch these up a little bit later on in the pet portrait as well. I'm constantly adjusting my tones as more context goes down and I'm able to better see where the lights are and where the darks are. So I'm heading into the shadow now and I'm about to bring out one of my little nifty tricks for this pet portrait and one that you can definitely use in your own. You can see I start off fairly ordinarily with my darker tones but then I go in with the highlights. Now the reason for this is the pastel mat is totally clean underneath these areas and I know I'm going to get pure pastel down. I really need these parts to jump forward to give the dog proper dimension. When you've got longer It can be a little bit more difficult to get a good 3D form over the whole drawing by the end because of course a lot of the form is hidden. Now here is the second big trick for this drawing. I'm going in with some purple which might seem really odd but you can bring this into your own pet portraits. The reason is I'm working with a lot of yellows for the coat. Now yellow and purple are opposite on a colour wheel which simply means that they are complementary and they contrast each other. Really beautifully. So just like those dark hairs are contrasting the lighter hairs, by going in with purples into my shadows, the lighter yellow hairs will pop that little bit more. They're not just contrasted by a light and a dark, they're also contrasted by the colour family that they're a part of. So again, there you could see I was going in with some... Warmer purples that time but still purple colours and I often use this trick on pet portraits to help bring them to life and bring a bit of sunshine into the whole piece. You'll see as I carry on that I use a variety of different greys and actually some of my greys are very purple. They're basically a Payne's grey and different brands give you different colours. So a Carbello Payne's Grey, Stabilo brand, is very purple, much more purple than the Faber-Castell brand, which I would say is more blue. So I do use some of that really purple Carbello in here. And that's where I do quite like to have a little bit of a selection of pastel pencils to work with. So here is that Payne's Grey now. And you'll see later on how I bring the lighter side of the face to life by, again, contrasting this yellow and purple. Now when it comes to working on the mouth for a pet portrait, do be aware that you don't want to make the teeth crystal white. If you do this they're going to stand out too much. Now You can see in the reference photo the teeth are very white but I actually have gone in with some light greys and a little bit of bister just to tone them down a bit and once again transitioned the tones. I've made sure that not all of the edges around the teeth are actually perfect and I've given myself some softer transitions which takes the attention back to the nose and back to that gorgeous eye. which again you can see if we compare it to the reference photo I've not covered quite as much of that eye with the fur just so that the viewer can have a better connection with the pet portrait by the end. So remember you can take artistic license like that. Now as I start to work on the lighter side of the face I'm yet again going in with some clean light ivories to begin with and then look at this under painting that I'm building out. We've been using purples in the shadows and then in the lighter areas I'm using some warm yellows and oranges which are really going to contrast the shadow tones. I have also weaved in a little bit of blue just to make sure that we get the complementary to the orange in there and it's allowing the second half of the face that I'm drawing now to really pull forward, catch light and bring the whole thing into a 3D realistic form. I've also worked quite a bit around the nose and the eyes throughout this drawing to Nest them in and make sure that we've stepped from the dark tones into the light tones so that we get a beautiful fluffy depth to the fur and it doesn't feel flat. Make sure that when you're finishing off your pet portrait, you always go back in and pick out the lightest lights with a white. Now, if you want to see how I create the outline for pet portraits and other drawings, just head over to my channel. I'll link some useful videos for you below and enjoy learning how to draw pet portraits With pastel pencils.