Westminster Dog Show

Brutal would be a mild description for the winter we have been having on Longeyeland. When the city got 8" of snow, my town got 24".  It has been a season of shoveling, shivering, sniffling, eating and sleeping. I needed  a sketching fix. It started with this portrait(from a photo) of my friends English Bulldog, Coco Chanel, who passed several months ago. I had so much fun doing this, I am now on a roll to do more.

 When the Westminster Dog Show came on TV the other night, I thought this would make the perfect sketching opportunity to keep from getting rusty. All I can say is Wow! This was some of the most taxing , marathon sketching I have done. I can also say that some of the results were pretty pathetic, but I wasn't sketching a beauty contest to capture its beauty.Here are the sketches, and some of them are real dogs(pun intended).

When sketching people, you can pretty much wing it when it comes to the face, eyes, hair. Who's going to know if it isn't exact? When you sketch dogs from a dog show, they have very specific characteristics. The show pace is very fast and a close up shot is very short before they go trotting and strutting their stuff around the ring so I concentrated on the face only. About 10/15 seconds of intense observation of eyes, ears, head shape, muzzle, and fur, and about the same amount of time to get it down on paper.

Maybe next year I can go sketch backstage during the primping and grooming and do location sketching, but during the winter of discontent, the TV will have to do. And the winner is... Miss P, the cute little Beagle!