Michelle Wrighton Fine Art and Photography

Well I tried very hard to get into my studio to start a painting, but with school holidays, kids, horses, sheep dogs and an assortment of others things (including my little studio laptop that I use to display reference photos dying unexpectedly) I haven’t made it into the studio to actually paint.  The website re-design is also taking up some time, but once that is ready my website will revert back to being a full ‘static’ website with this blog part of the website.

In between everything else, I have managed a couple of graphite sketches to help me get back into the swing of things. I was a bit rusty at first as I haven’t done any graphite work for a couple of years, but these sketches have reminded me why I love graphite so much.  I have deliberately created these as sketches rather than detailed photorealistic drawings and have found that not focusing on achieving strict photorealism has made the process so much more enjoyable and I can definitely see myself doing a lot more work that while still realistic is looser and more expressive that the traditional work I have created in the past.   LOL I am sure that being able to start and finish a drawing within five hours instead of slaving over it for 50 hours is partly why I enjoyed it more!

Border Collie puppy graphite drawing on A4 drafting film by Michelle Wrighton

If you would like to commission a pencil portrait graphite sketch in this style of your own Border Collie, dog, cat, horse or other pet please contact me to discuss your requirements.

Thanks for visiting my blog  and sharing my art and photography with your family and friends!

x Michelle

Michelle Wrighton: Animal, Wildlife & Landscape Fine Art & Photography

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I am slowly resigning myself to the idea that the ‘challenges’ of country wireless internet means I can’t necessarily update my blog whenever its suitable to me and that blog posts are probably better late than never. So in that spirit, this is an older digital painting of Annabelle, a black Standard Poodle, with a step by step progress demonstration image to show how the painting was created.

Black Standard Poodle Pet Portrait Painting

Although painted digitally using my Intuos 4 drawing tablet and ‘digital’ paintbrush, I develop the painting digitally just like I do when painting or drawing with traditional art mediums. I sketch the subject, and then start adding colour by blocking in the main shapes and values (shadows and highlights), and ‘glaze’ with varying degrees of transparent colour to create depth and form. Finally the details are added to complete the painting.

Painting in Progress images Black Standard Poodle

If you would like to commission a portrait of your poodle or other pet in traditional oil paints, graphite/charcoal or a digital painting such as this one, please contact me to discuss your requirements.

I know it only takes a couple of minutes to add a blog post, but my life has been such a rollercoaster of one crisis after another this years and the last few months have just been torturous, I havn’t even had the chance to post the blog posts that I have as drafts waiting to post!  Fingers crossed that life for my family will remain on an even keel and we can start to have some sort of normal life (or at least as normal as things can be given our situation!).

Anyway, enough of that, I have some photos orders going out this week, and for those people waiting to book portrait sessions, I will be getting through the rest of my emails this week hopefully, and once I catch up with everything, I will be able to book sessions that have been delayed.  I will also be adding posts that I have sitting in my drafts folder, so my apologies to those readers who receive notification when the blog is updated, if I don’t get interrupted this evening a few more older posts are going to appear…theres a sneak peak of my digital paintings which might be of interest to anyone who has been waiting for me to start doing pet portrait commissions again:)

Michelle

Wow Christmas seems to have come around so quickly this year! I’ve finished my last Christmas commission, a commermorative portrait of a beautiful Australian Kelpie called Tas who recently passed away. This portrait was done on Art Spectrum blue-grey Colourfix paper, 9 x 12 inches with a pastel underpainting and all the top layers of detail done in artists colour pencils.

Breed Profile: The Australian Kelpie

The Australian Kelpie was developed in the 1800′s by a small group of Australian Pastoralists from the inter-mixing of offspring of three pairs of working sheepdogs from Scotland.

Kelpies are an alert, eager, highly intelligent, loving, gentle, easily trained, loyal and devoted breed. Although devloped as a sheepdog – a job at which they excel, Kelpies also make wonderful family pets for people who can accomodate their mental and physical activity needs with pleanty of excercise and activities that allows them to use their intelligence, like Obedience training, agility, tracking or other dog sports.

The Australian Kelpie is of medium size, with males usually between 46 – 51 cm (18 – 20 inches) and females betwee 43 – 48 cm (17 – 19 inches).

The Kelpie has a moderately short coat (imagine somehwhere between a German Shepherd Dog and a Doberman), and has seven different colour variations: Red, Red and Tan, Black, BLack and tan, Chocolate, fawn and Smoke blue.

Follow the link below to see photos of different Australian Kelpie dogs:

http://images.google.com.au/images?q=Australian+Kelpie&hl=en&btnG=Search+Images

Now I just have to finish and frame Amarok’s portrait and I can have a short holiday over Christmas and do some ‘non-commission’ art for myself:)

I hope you all have a Happy and Safe Christmas and New Year, wherever you may be in the world!

Cheers

Michelle