Animal Portraits, This Artist's Specialty

Animal portrait painting is just the same as human portraiture with the exception that animals hate to pose

. Keeping the animal's attention from wavering is a total workout for an artist. An artist of Wilmington has chosen this field as her specialization.

Her ancestry is traced to the well known Delaware family. Her grandfather was the artist who did many of the famous collection of sea and landscape paintings. Unsurprisingly, this female artist was already painting by age 3.

Animal drawings were her favorites. It was at the age of 10 that she had her first show and at age 12 when she began making illustration for children's books. She was taught to dance all types of dances by famous Philadelphia teachers.

For many years she was a dancer with her own solo performances, including one where she convincingly portrayed her dying.

Of all the animals she has painted portraits of, what interests her the most are canines. The way she starts working on a dog's portrait sparks interest. She makes several sketches of the dog while the owner is kept busy trying to keep the dog from changin his positions.

The pencil seems to jump as she makes sketches on her sketchpad in an effort to find a pose that would best suit the dog. Meanwhile, she talks to the dog and compliments him for his appearance and behavior.

To hold the interest of the animal, she employs different props and sometimes even tidbits of food. She asks the owner for photos and makes a request to make copies of these photos for her collection.

Snips from the ears, tail, and tummy are collected from the dog so that she can determine the colors to use. These snips are kept for each dog's file.

The next thing she does is to make a choice of pose and background for the shot. The kind of dog or animal used in the shot will be the basis for the selection of the latter.

For one particular portrait of a Chesapeake Bay retriever, she stayed in a duck blind and did sketches.

She thinks that animals, just like humans, can form their own opinions. This was proven by a damaged painting which had been chewed upon by an American pointer who seemed to show disgust for it. He had to get large doses of medicine for that reaction toward the painting, so it must have been a really bad one.

For a portrait that either shows a beagle or a basset, she puts in a paw print to blend with the scenery and adds on the back the kennel club's identifying symbols. With her dog to aid her, she even made abstract backgrounds.

Sometimes, the animals don't make it easy. One model ran off with one of the female dogs, putting a sudden end to all portrait painting for that day. While this may seem natural, it also seems that the unexpected can be expected when painting an animal's portrait.

by: John Chambers

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