Step 5

I get leery of all that brown in the background and wonder if I will ever be able to fill it with grass, so I squeezed out some yellow, black and several greens and blues and go to town. Some people don't realize that a nice lemon yellow and black makes a beautiful set of greens. Mix yellows and blues and you get many many more. I also include some blues and blacks in the grass to indicate shadows behind the grass. It's far from being done, but that brown is not a solid block any more. All of her wrinkles on her forehead and nose are also blown out to white in my reference photo because it was taken in the bright sunshine. So I have to try and create what they really look like. Lots of back and forth on these! Then I realized she had a spot of brown on the top of her head from another photo. Might as well indicate that too! Added some more dark blue pink grays inside her mouth.

Step 4

She's started to loo a bit like a bulldog! Yeah! Next I have some fun, adding the eyes. Here's are a black blur in the photo, so I used several photos of English Bulldogs' eyes for reference. I love to add a lot of color into the eyes to draw the viewer to them. Her eyes ended up with some brown, blue, green, purple, black and white. In various amounts! Also added some green to her nose. Green? Why? It's the opposite of orange (sienna) on the color scale, so it adds a nice contrast when you paint over it with more layers of thinned paint. Also darkened up the tongue. Adding blue to the alizarin crimson makes that peculiar color that dogs' noses have and the tongues also have. Added some purple in there in the mix. I also started to add more dark browns to the shadow areas of her coat.

Step by Step to Paint an English Bulldog

I received a commission to paint a beautiful English Bulldog about 6 weeks ago. I've been really busy ever since. I've been wanting to post some of my steps so I'm doing it now!

It was to be in oil paint so my first step was to collect as much reference material on her as possible, and find other reference on specific parts like bulldog eyes, which were blown out in the photo. You find something to work with in all cases. So I had about 8 photos to work with. I started with a quick pencil sketch on the canvas. It ended up being too far to the right, so I carefully erased and redrew my sketch. This is what I started with.