I was pretty excited about this portrait for a couple of reasons, and the first one is – I love the dog’s name, Bagel! I just love food names for pets! The other reason I was excited about this one was because it was my first order from my experimental listing on my Etsy page. Also a large majority of my portraits are for people I know, or friends of people I know, so it’s always nice to have an order from another source to mix things up a little!

This was a smaller size than I usually work in, 8×10 for the original, but still plenty of room to work. I also have really come to enjoy doing portraits in graphite, although when drawing white animals with colored pencil, my go to method has been to use blue to create the shadowy areas and kind of make the white “pop”, so it was a little harder to wrap my brain around just using graphite to create a sense of shading and fur without making him end up grey.

This portrait was completed with the help of three moderate quality photos of Bagel as it was a surprise birthday present and it would have been problematic to get higher quality photos without raising suspicion. I also used some photos of other American Bulldogs to help get some of the bone structure and finer details.

I was using a new scanner when I scanned this image, so I feel like it doesn’t *quite* do the original justice, but the client seemed happy with the results, and I was pretty pleased with how young Bagel turned out!

~Tricia