August 31, 2009

Art Challenge

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I subscribe to a few different YouTube channels.  One of them is Kikopup.  Emily is a great clicker trainer and an artist who has several tutorials on her site about clicker training.  She recently posted an art tutorial titled "How to paint your pets portrait" found here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQvERQoHvgg And she challenged her viewers to try the technique and post a video of their results.
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After watching it, I thought well that's a great tutorial!  But I don't have any paint or brushes or canvas (though now I'm tempted to get some!) But then I read the comments posted and in those she mentions that paint is not required.  A person can use what they have on hand!  So I thought, well I have a bunch of colored pencils in the other room, why not!  I just took a photo of Dazzle that I LOVE so I'll give it a try!
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This is the original photo I used:
I printed that out and put it over a piece of card stock and used carbon paper to trace the main parts of the image. I used the printed image as a guide for the colors too.
Then I started selecting colors, starting with the lightest and going to the darkest.  I did end up making Dazzle's body darker as I went along till it was just right.
Here it is after all the colors were added, just need to crop the sides...
Here's the finished product!  I'm very happy with how it turned out!  I didn't expect to get a result I would be willing to post :-)  I have worked with clay and carved rubber, but drawing is not my strong suit.  So the tracing method worked really well for me!  I CAN color between the lines :-) 
Not sure if I'll do anything with this, but it's currently posted to my bulletin board by my computer. I made a 40 second video using the photos I took during the process (which are also posted above).  If you want to see it, it's at: