George & Mikey Portraits

Laura McHugh East set the challenge this week - do a portrait of your pet.

I have two little doggie dogs: George and Mikey. They are both rescues from the local humane society. George is a Bichon Frise / Poodle mix (white). Mikey is a Papillon / Chihuahua mix (black). They adore each other and we love them lots.

I took inspiration for how to do the portrait from an artist in the Portland area - Susan Schenk.  Susan teaches workshops on doing pet portraits with collage.

I liked the idea so I found my favorite photo of each dog and used that as a base. I just printed out an 8.5x11 on regular printer paper from my color printer.

Mikey

Since the thing I found on the web is a workshop, there wasn't really any "how to" information. Just a materials list. So I gathered up the stuff and started in - using my go-to approach called "fake it 'til you make it."


The materials list said to use Yes paste. I had some in my studio and this was much better than glue-sticking the little pieces of paper on the printout.

 

Here are all the pieces of magazine and some really cool black tissue paper a top I got online came wrapped in. I just picked quickly pages from the magazine that seemed to have similar colors to the photo.

I actually did the portrait of George first. Here he is sitting with me while I was working.





Here are the finished portraits:

King George - from a photo of him watching TV wearing my reading glasses last year.

Mikey Dude - taking in the view of the Pacific from up on the roof, taken last month.
 

This was a really fun project and I think Claire will enjoy hanging the portraits of her "boys" in her room.