Lots to share: The Professional Dog is out in print and as an ebook on Storyberries! In a bit I’m sharing my creative process for my holiday box project. But first, because people tell me they’re enjoying it, I am continuing to feature 3 dogs from The Professional Dog per week so here’s this weeks…

The text in the book, which is also the title of the original artwork, is below each of this weeks featured dogs.

Here’s the ebook on Storyberries.com

I wanted to share somehow that my original artwork for The Professional Dog is smaller than the finished book. So I did a video look at all of the original artwork for The Professional Dog. Each original dog portrait is 2.5 x 3.5 inches and was made by hand using ink and gouache on board. The finished print book is 6 x 9 inches and as faithfully as possible reproduces the colors and details in the original artwork. I did this because the reproductions do enlarge the details in the artwork. Below is a photo showing a bit of what I’m saying … perhaps you can see both the small original art and the book reproductions?

I’m still learning how to put video in these posts but here’s the link to the video https://youtu.be/3hAOKBosDDU

You could say that Thanksgiving was a nicely quiet event considering it was just my spouse and I and a giant veggie lasagna. But it really felt like we’d hosted a come-and-go party all day as we were in contact with friends and family via text, social media and the voice phone! It was such a fun day and we both went to bed tired-happy feeling like we’d been talking and partying nonstop! We joked that we could get used to partying like this – there was a lot less to clean up afterwards! Lol!

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After the holiday I delivered all of the original art for The Professional Dog to the Aurora Gallery. This project was a big one that encompassed multiple months of intense work and it all – all 40 dog portraits – fit into a 5 x 7 x 4 inch box! (Another benefit of making the original art small in size)

Here’s the box of original artwork sitting atop the signed books wrapped in paper for protection during transfer to the Aurora Gallery.

Even though everything is done now including the portfolio page for The Professional Dog I will still be posting the dog portraits in sequence over the next weeks. People have told me that they’re enjoying them.

The Thanksgiving event held by the Caplan Art Designs Gallery also began the day after Thanksgiving. Below is another attempt to include a video in this blog. This video was made by the Gallery and is shared by permission. In case I’ve not gotten the video embedded in this post like I think I do – the video camera pans around a nice large room filled with art by the Caplan Art Designs Gallery artists. You see some of my larger works right at the start. Many of my works are small and not captured in the video. My last post included images of my artworks in this event. Over the weekend the Gallery posted more videos on the Gallery’s Instagram and Facebook pages that showed more of the event! There were many sales of my artwork and of the other Gallery artists work!

And now for the full details about the holiday box project! Back in very early September the Caplan Art Gallery gave certain artists an 8 inch cube to paint in our style. These boxes are to be in a special holiday exhibit opening the first Thursday in December.

Immediately when I got my box and over the next 4 days, I began the process of putting 3 coats of gesso on it even though I didn’t know what I would create.

While the gesso dried over that first week I brainstormed in both my sketchbook and on my legal pad. First I listed over 20 things that I could think of that are square or cube shaped. Then in my sketchbook I played visually with the various items listed to see what might be fun, how I might approach it. During this time my spouse and I had a dear friend come over to our outdoor patio to visit and have dinner. I told her what I was brainstorming and she liked the idea of dice.

At that time I was still in the middle of creating the dog portraits for The Professional Dog so it felt natural to think of dog shelters and dice, the chances for pet adoption, the many names for dogs … so in my brainstorming with my friend and my spouse we thought “what are the odds you’d find 21 dogs named Chance”?

My sketchbook became focused on dice-dot portraits of dogs.

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I also rummaged about the house and found some game dice I could use as a model.

Using a ruler I calculated the size of the dots in relation to the size of the cube and I made measurement marks on the gesso using a watercolor pencil. The watercolor pencil marks will blend in and dissolve when I paint over the marks with acrylic paints.

Since the cube is a sculpture and will likely be handled by humans or sat upon by cats I decided from the start to work in acrylic as that’s a permanent waterproof media. I also planned to (and did) varnish it so the dice could be protected and easily cleaned.

I painted a different dog portrait on each dot on my dice using black and white acrylics mixed to form a range of greys. And yes, some of the dog breed research and practice I was already doing for The Professional Dog was applied to this project too.

After painting each dice-dot with a dog using black and white acrylics I painted the body of the dice with white acrylic. Every bit of the gesso got covered! Below you can see the entire dice in 3d plus each dice face separately so you can enlarge it and see the portraits.

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I hope you had a yummy and fun Thanksgiving too. I look forward to catching up with some of my fellow bloggers and hearing about your creative projects but some of my days this week might resemble this…

… even if it does I hope you have a delightful week! See you next Monday.