How to cut your preliminary creative process time in half!

I love a good shortcut. Whilst there is no quick route to creating a good quality art piece for a client, there are ways to take little shortcuts when developing the creative concept for smoochy poochy portraits. These 10 quick questions will open up a can of worms to your thinking process, but in due course it will allow you to make quicker decisions about what type of background to incorporate (if any at all). Because lets face it, not all puppies are the same and it’s important to capture the unique cuteness of every fur baby.

We need to remember that we are making our smoochy poochy the focal point of our picture. However, continuously doing a grey scale portrait with a blank background can be BORING. I know, I myself started to get bored with my art and then I realised I was holding back… WAYYYYY back. It started to stunt my creativity and I also started to lose interest in my art. It started to become a job. GAH! Why would anyone do that to them selves?!?! So then I decided to throw all my barriers to one side. Determined to get the spark back in my art, I decided I would create the most fascinating, colourful, lively portraits I could think of. And it blew my creativity wide open. Now in saying this, we should remember that whilst we want to unleash the inner creative beast, we should probably apply some basic rules to ensure we don’t loose the subject amongst the wonderment of colour. Below, I have created 9 simple questions you should ask your self when adding a background to your smoochy poochy portrait. Read on to find out more! It’s important to think about how to juxtapose the point at which the dogs fur meets the background. Elements I think of include

1. Tight curly hair of a puppy sitting next to flowers or grass that have lines that are more flat and long in shape.

2. How much background to I want to be present?

3. The direction of the foliage and background elements such as hills and landscape

4. What is the tonal value of the dog? If the dog has light hair, then the surrounding folliagle / background / foreground should be dark

5. Does that dog require a background at all? A heavily dark coloured dog with dense fur might get lost in a busy background

6. Does the photograph background take away the focus from the dog?

7. How can you use elements of the background to frame the dog’s face / body?

8. Do you want to create an atmospheric perspective in your background? For example a border collie sitting on a farm with some sheep near by?

9. Do you want to isolate the figure? Does removing all background elements better capture the dog?

10. How much colour or graphite do you want to incorporate? Is this going to be full grey scale? Or full colour? Or a mix and match?

I hope this helps you in your journey to creating beautiful pet portraits! Don’t forget to follow me on Instagram or facebook for more insider secrets.