Dogs, Cats, and La La Land

Hi everyone and welcome back to another exciting blog post! First of all, I'd like to say that I am having a small disaster in that we have run out of teabags. So I'm writing this post with a lemon and ginger herbal tea, instead of a regular ol' classic, British cuppa. (And frankly, as nice as the lemon and ginger tea is, it just isn't cutting it and I might have to nip to the shops to remedy the situation.) Anyway, all I'm saying is, if this post lacks the usual zest, you'll know why. (It's that I'm a fraud and all the blog posts come directly from the caffeine.) So, what's it all about this week? Commissions, commissions, commissions. Now, generally, when an artist hears the word commission, it will induce either a groan of dread or a squeak of excitement. Personally, I fall into the latter category, I absolutely love doing commissions with people, I love the back and forth process, but most of all, I love the end reveal, where you can see how much people are truly passionate about what or who you're painting for them. So, for this post I'm going to go through what doing a commission is like, which steps are involved, and the process in general. So, to begin with, usually someone approaches me very cautiously, as I don't have prices listed for commissions anywhere on any of my social media sites or on my website. I think people are generally fearful that they'll ask for a sketch of their hamster, and I'll get back to them in two days with a completed sketch and charge them £6572 for it. The reason for I don't post the prices is that it is entirely dependent on what the customer wants for their commission, and it would take me a very long time to compile a list of all the possible things I can imagine a customer might want. It varies from materials to size to traditional vs digital to whether they want the final piece framed, do they want the original or a print, the list goes on and on, and so the easiest way for me, (and easier for the customer too, navigating such a list or table would be a frightful task I imagine!) is simply to respond on a client to client basis, with no pressure for them to commit to anything until we have agreed on a price and they are happy for me to begin the work. So usually I'll receive an email or phone call asking for more information, there will be a back and forth, and after a few emails, the customer is happy for me to start work. At this stage, I would ask for some photographs of the subject, (usually always pets or animals in my case) and I will start sketching and doing some very rough, quick paintings of the pet/s to get an idea of how I'll fit the painting together. I've asked the owner of Moby and Charlie, a recent commission I did over the Christmas period, if it would be okay for me to use her pictures for this post, and she very kindly said yes, so I can show you those as an example throughout this post.

From a few of the images I was sent of Charlie (left) and Moby (right), I started doing quick sketches and working on the composition of the piece. The client wanted the two to be lying together in grass, and so I came up with a (very) rough sketch to confirm that it was what she wanted, before going ahead to start working on the actual piece itself, starting with a pencil sketch.

These are the rough sketches, and then below we have the first draft of the pencil sketch. Once the pencil sketch is done, I'll send that to the client and ask them if there's anything that needs tweaking, since there is a lot of personality and character in every pet and it can sometimes to be difficult to glean from photos, and after all, no one knows their pets better than their owners! (For example, Charlie always has a tennis ball with her, and so the client asked if I could incorporate that into the piece. Little details like this really help bring the character to life in a painting, and are details I would never be able to guess from a few pictures.)

Having sent this to the client, they noted that the left ear on Moby wasn't quite accurate, he has very unique ears and so it was obviously important to get these right. After a bit of playing, I tweaked it and sent it back, and once this was fixed, it was time to add colour!

So the image on the left here was the ear I originally drew, and on the right was the one that I fixed up and studied a lot more closely to make sure I got correctly down on paper. The client was happy once I had done this and so I could then move onto adding in some colour and paint! At this stage, once the pencil sketch is complete and the client is happy with it, I do usually ask for a small portion of the payment as a deposit. This is only a safeguard just in case after I spend many hours on a piece, the client pulls out last minute. This way, even if that does happen (and thankfully it hasn't ever happened to me) then it hasn't been an entirely fruitless endeavor.

Now, adding colour is also a very important stage, as again, you can only get so much information from one picture, which is why I would usually request at least a few pictures from a client, as in each picture the lighting might be different and this can change the colour, particularly of fur, which catches light and takes on different hues and tones based on the surrounding light. So at this stage, I would usually send frequent updates to the client to make sure the colours are looking accurate.

Again, once I have sent this back and forth a few times with the client, I am then ready to scan it into my laptop and enhance the image digitally. At this stage, as well, if there any changes the client would like to the original image, once the paint is down, it is much easier for me to correct digitally than it would be to attempt to remedy it traditionally using paint. At first, once scanned in, I just tend to tidy the image up a little bit, erase any background information like the texture of the watercolour paper, keeping the background a clean cut white, and playing with colour balances and saturation to make the actual subjects stand out the best. I would then go about making any additional changes the client wanted, before discussing anything else that they wanted. In this particular example, the client was unsure about how to have the background, so I created a few mock up designs before we decided that the image looked best as it was originally created, with the pets lying on the grass with a white background. Other backgrounds simply drew the viewer's eyes away from the subjects and since they are the main focus of the piece, this wasn't what the client or I wanted. I did create more dynamic and brightly coloured grass at the client's request, and once that was done, we were very nearly finished.

This image was one of the final images before I scanned it in, the only changes to be made were adding a small amount more of the painted grass. The image below is the scanned in and cleaned up version, with one of the optional background options the client requested, for the whole of the bottom half of the image to consist of grass. Once we had seen this though, we decided that the perspective on this didn't look quite right and so we quickly abolished this idea.

Finally, once we had decided the final composition, all that was left to do was to format it appropriately. The client wanted the final piece mounted and framed, and so I just had to correctly measure the borders to make sure the piece would fit the frame.

And that's it! Printed and sent to the client, and you can see above the completed and framed piece that the client so kindly sent me an image of. I'd like to say a big thank you to the client who has allowed me to write this post! I have kept you mostly anonymous in case you didn't want to be named directly. (I have included the names of your lovely pets though, so I suppose anyone who knows you well enough to have met your pets can deduce who you are from that!) Thanks for reading everyone, I hope it was an enjoyable post, and I did actually buy teabags mid-post, and so some of this post is actually caffeine-fuelled... (I wonder if you can tell where it was?) Catch you next week, Rachel x

Also a small P.S.

I went to see La La Land this week and if you haven't seen it, you need to go and see it right now! It's Friday night (if you're reading this when it comes out, if not, then go see it anyway!), the perfect time for a movie! I'm tempted to dedicate an entire blog post to why La La Land is so great but I think that might be a little bit extreme but goooodness meeee I am obsessed with it, I can't stop playing the soundtrack. Okay, end of P.S., thanks again for reading love you byeeeeeee x