Dog Star Football and Fringe Benefits - Painting Again (Part 1)

In my New Years Resolutions post I said I wanted to do more painting this year and now I've finally made a start with two paintings, 'Dog Star Football' and 'Fringe Benefit'.

The keyword here is 'start'. This is the first of a series of posts and video diaries documenting the progress of these two artworks. One is destined to be my first artwork in a while that I've listed on Ebay, whilst the other will be exhibited at The Gawler Community Gallery during this coming March.

At this point I'll tell you about what inspired each artwork.

Dog Star Football

Dog Star Football - Primary colours undercoat.

Final 'Tera' Artwork.

Dog Star Football started out as one of many sketches I did trying to create a cartoon version of my brother's dog, Tera, to put on some Cafepress items and send to him as a gift for his birthday last year.

He's a follower of Australian Rules Football which prompted an idea of combining his dog with football in some way. Hence the sketch of the dog balancing a football on her tail (Tera's a female dog). See the image below.

Practice sketches for 'Tera' done last year.

Obviously the football idea didn't happen for the final design but I looked at this sketch today and thought somebody would love a painting that mixes two great loves in the one image.

Dog Star Puppy, Aug 2006

One thing you'll notice between this sketch and the painting so far is that I've added a star shaped marking around the dog's right eye. That's a homage to an artwork I did several years ago now called 'Dog Star Puppy' which featured a puppy dog with a similar star shaped marking over its right eye.

As you can see in the first image I've got as far as the base, primary colours, acrylic, underpainting that I start all my artworks with. Dog Star Football will be available to purchase on Ebay some time in early March.

Fringe Benefit

Fringe Benefit (painting on the right).

My local gallery, The Gawler Community Gallery, is holding an open exhibition in March of 2013 for anyone to create an artwork on a 12" x 12" canvas with the theme being based around the word 'Fringe'. The exhibition is being run as part of the Adelaide Fringe Festival.

As secretary of the gallery I put my hand up for designing the exhibition's promotional poster, including the featured illustration - which I always intended to paint and enter into the exhibition.

As the theme is related to the word 'fringe' and artists painting something related to the word, I took a literal approach with the idea of showing an artist painting a picture of her very nicely prettied up fringe. A 'Fringe Benefit'... I guess.

Original poster image inked
with Manga Studio EX4

Readers of my Animation and Video blog will recognize the source poster image as the one I sketched on paper first then scanned and inked digitally with Manga Studio EX4.

The image is actually a lot more detailed than what I'd usually paint so it will be interesting to see how it turns out.

As with Dog Star Football, so far I've only completed the base under painting.

The final artwork will be on display at the gallery during March 2013 and will be for sale.

If you're interested to not just read but to also see the artworks being created then below is part one of my studio, video diary documenting both artwork's creation.