Amigo

Here's a memorial pet portrait I recently created. His name is Amigo, and I was told he loved the beach. It was commissioned by a friend of his owners, as a surprise, so I only had a few facebook photos to go off - not the best situation; I had four photos, he was lying down in all of them, and I could only see his body in one of them. However, he was a nice plain-coloured Labrador, so that made it easier, any old Labrador-body would do. It's when dogs have specific patterns that I don't know about that we run into problems! (PSA: 'Illustrator' is not synonymous with 'Clairvoyant' ^.~) 

See below the cut for a couple of progress shots:

Audrey Hepburn

Here's a portrait commission I finished recently. It would be the photo of Audrey Hepburn that contained the absolute maximum of lace, flowers, and ribbons, wouldn't it? If I'm honest, I prefer her look in Sabrina, but I don't get to choose the reference. =P

This is almost A3 in size, and done almost entirely in graphite. I confess to a little Copic Opaque White in the lace of her cap, to get the netting effect.

You can head over to deviantArt to see a list of all the materials I use for pencil portraiture.

Have a look at some of my process below the cut, snaffled from my Instagram Stories:

Robert Mitchum

Another private portraiture commission, this time of Robert Mitchum. 

100% graphite, almost A3 in size. For a run-down of all the materials I use in pencil portraiture, head over to deviantArt.

See below the cut for a couple of process images:

Charlotte Brontë

For International Women's Day I coloured up this colouring page of Charlotte Brontë that is included in my Literary Romance Colouring Book. Charlotte Brontë is definitely one of the women of the past who paved the way for us today, even if she originally had to do so under a male pseudonym. 

She's sitting on the Brontë chair, a natural rock formation near her home.

If you'd like to colour this too, it's in my colouring book, along with 32 other pages - portraits of Austen and Gaskell, and illustrations from Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Persuasion, Jane Eyre, Wives and Daughters and North and South. Buy it here! (there is a trailer for the Austen section of the book on my website)

And as I did the colouring in in Procreate on the iPad Pro (using only the standard 6B pencil brush) here is a timelapse. For maximum size I've embedded my Instagram post (blogger uploaded it very tiny), so you'll need to click to the second image, the first is just the illustration itself.

A post shared by Alison Mutton (@alene.art) on Mar 8, 2018 at 10:59am PST

Lapphund Christmas Cards 2017

Every year I do custom Christmas cards for some lovely friends. We started in 2013, when they had just got their first dog, so she was the subject of the cards. In 2014 they had a second dog, so I added her in, and by 2015 they had a gorgeous little boy, who naturally had to be included too!  This year marks the 5th year of this card series, their little boy is now two and a half, and most of their card recipients have now tumbled to the fact that these are custom commissioned cards, they aren't just super-good at finding cards with dogs that look like theirs!

Back when they only had dogs, I used to do two separate designs for them, but now I just do one, with a traditional Christmassy red-green-gold colour scheme, and another with a blue-gold-grey colour scheme. Here's that second colourway:

You'll notice that the icecream in this one doesn't match the rest of the colours - that's because strawberry icecream is his favourite and we wanted to feature that. The red card has a choc-mint icecream, (because strawberry doesn't match red) and let me tell you, I got very hungry while painting it!

We got them printed at Moo, and they of course did a wonderful job:

These were done in Adobe Photoshop cc 2018 on a Wacom Mobile Studio Pro.

Go below the cut to see all the previous years' cards:

Alastair: 12-month Portrait

I keep thinking I have blogged this, and it appears I haven't, so I must rectify that! If you follow me on social media you will have seen snippets of this piece some months back; it's a piece I did for a friend's birthday in July. Her son, Alastair, was also born in July, just a week after her birthday, so it seemed like an excellent time to give her a 12-month portrait of his first 12 months of life. I was inspired by her remarking that he changed so much from day to day. I enlisted the help of her mother, who made sure I had a selection of nice photos for every month. Babies are so expressive, I had fun choosing lots of different moods! 

The painting is just under A3 in size, so each individual portrait is quite small:

I took a number of timelapse videos while I was working. All of them were shared after I had finished the painting and given it away, so that it was a complete surprise.

A little #timelapse #video of this #babyportrait. 💜 #wip #workinprogress #baby #babyboy #painting #art #watercolour #watercolor #paint #artistatwork #cute #sweet

A post shared by Alison Mutton (@alene.art) on Jul 12, 2016 at 12:47am PDT

Another #timelapse #wip #babyportrait 💜 #workinprogress #baby #babyboy #cute #sweet #artistatwork #painting #paint #watercolour #watercolor #portraiture #babyportraiture

A post shared by Alison Mutton (@alene.art) on Jul 13, 2016 at 12:46am PDT

These last two timelapses are two parts of the same painting. The limit for a timelapse is 10 minutes, so I couldn't fit a whole painting into one. As it was, I always started with the base skin tones already down and dry - no one wants to watch a timelapse of paint drying!

Some more #babyportrait #wip #timelapse. 💜 #portraiture #portrait #babyportraiture #baby #babyboy #sweet #cute #watercolour #watercolor #paint #painting #art #artistatwork #artistofinstagram

A post shared by Alison Mutton (@alene.art) on Jul 14, 2016 at 12:23am PDT

Finishing the #watercolour #painting in this baby portrait. The first half of this video is in my gallery. 😊 #watercolor #artistsofinstagram #artistatwork #art #baby #portrait #portraiture #babyportrait #babyportraiture #paint #wip #workinprogress #timelapse #hyperlapse #cute #sweet #babyboy #process

A post shared by Alison Mutton (@alene.art) on Jul 16, 2016 at 12:35am PDT

Each individual portrait took in the region of 40 to 60 minutes to sketch and paint, so we're looking at somewhere in the region of 8 to 12 hours for the whole piece. I sketched each portrait out in pencil first, and then it's almost entirely watercolour, apart from a few coloured pencil touches, mainly in the background. I'm really a mixed-media girl. 

I decided to keep the focus on the face by making all of his clothes white - in reality he has a varied wardrobe, but that made everything rather messy when 12 pictures and placed side-by-side.

Winsor and Newton watercolours and series 7 brushes, with Prismacolor pencils, on Moleskine watercolour paper.

This makes a great gift for a mother in your life (or for yourself), so if you'd like to commission something similar, please contact me via my website - I'd love to discuss it with you!

Bramble and Briar

I'm dividing my new website by age (so children's, middle grade, young adult) rather than the previous division of colour/black and white, digital/traditional, and realised that my Young Adult section was a bit thin. While staring into space trying to think of something to do for it, my eye fell on a portrait I did of a friend back in year 12, as one of the three paintings I did in TEE art. It's very dated now, my skills have improved so much, and I was never entirely happy with it as it was - and what better to put in a Young Adult illustration portfolio than a redo of a piece I myself did as a young adult? Plus, I'd come across the photos I took for it back in the day, while I was sorting out files on my computer. It was fate!

Here's the final piece:

I designed it as a book cover. I know everyone generally says that you shouldn't include text in your illustration portfolio as illustrators aren't qualified to work with type - but I have a degree in design, and I do a lot of work for self publishers, who need to see that I can apply type to a cover for them. So as a compromise, I have a version with text available upon roll-over on my website. Best of both worlds!

This isn't a real book. I came up with a title that fitted the image, and used a random name generator until I snagged one I liked for the author. I envisage that text being shiny gold foil....

It's quite a radical departure from the original painting I did back in 2004. I was referencing the Pre Raphaelites when I did it, and looking at the Victorian language of flowers. The plan was to do something very lush and a bit Bollywood inspired, with a huge bunch of white carnations, with a single red rose in the middle. But my art teacher didn't like that idea, and insisted I use coloured carnations, which really mucked up the message. I didn't paint the flowers very well anyway (not aided by the fact that I was working in oil paint, which gives me a bad migraine. Not the best situation for good painting!)

Here is the original:

Yeah. Oil paints really aren't my thing! 

So this was a chance to do it over, see how much I'd improved, and get more of the feel I'd originally been going for when I did the painting. However, I'm still scarred from painting all those carnations with a migraine, and I just couldn't bring myself to do a page full of carnations. So I went with all roses, influenced, no doubt, by the fact that I was listening to Robin Mckinley's Rose Daughter at the time.

Here's the reference photo. Isn't my friend gorgeous?

And here's a progress animation:

As you can see, one of the final stages was to add a colour adjustment and some lighting. That's the beauty of Photoshop. I also duplicated a lot of the roses, for which I am not sorry. =P 

All-up this took about 20 to 25 hours, and I did it in Adobe Photoshop CC2017 on a Wacom Cintiq Companion 2. No oil-paint-migraines for me this time!

Christening Cards

When Colour Collective's 'Clover Green' prompt came around, what I *really* needed to be doing was a couple of Christening cards for my cousin's two daughters, so I used the colour in the cards to get two things done at once. 

The card I shared for Colour Collective featured this illustration. This is Mary, the older of the sisters (she's nearly four). I wanted to go with a very spring theme as that seemed appropriate for a Christening card:

I added text to make it into a card:

And I also made another card for her sister Jemima - but just with flowers on, as Jemima is only six months old:

I used the same font family (Storytime) on both cards, to tie them together, and used daisies on both, as white flowers are popular for Christenings.

I added clear glitter to both cards, but I didn't have time to take a photo of the final result. It was one of those weeks where it was all go! =P

Both cards done in Adobe Photoshop CC2017 on a Wacom Cintiq Companion 2.

Portrait: Kim Novak

Here's a new movie star portrait. I don't do many of these now, although they were the mainstay of my work when I was a teenager.

I'll be honest, I didn't like working on this, for reasons I won't go into here. But I never let that stop me from creating work as best I can, and I think the end result is pretty good.

See some of my process below the cut:

Lapphund Christmas Cards 2016

A new Christmas card to add to the lineup for some lovely friends. I've been doing their cards since 2013 and they have evolved from one finnish lapphund, to two finnish lapphunds, to the addition of a baby. Said baby is now a cheeky toddler, and I thought it was about time he got up to some Christmas Card mischief!

The original sketch for this was a little different - I initially had the two dogs joining in with painting the wall, but it was decided that as they are generally more placid and long-suffering than they are naughty it would be better to reflect that. Here are the two sketches side by side. I switched orientation as I felt it worked better. 

Here's a progress animation:

Of course, I used reference photos (these cards are, after all, a slightly more arty equivalent of family-photo cards - they have to look accurate!), and I also used some free finger-paint brushes for the Christmas tree. I'm pretty sure they were these ones.  The nappy cover is inspired by the many wonderful ones he's regularly dressed in. I couldn't leave it plain when he always has such stylish ones!

I did two colour-ways, as usual, as we get them printed at Moo, and it's nice to take advantage of the printfinity option. Back when it was only dogs I used to do two different designs, but lately it's just been different colours. 

Here's the whole line-up of cards. I always keep to roughly the same look. I've linked to the corresponding blog posts if you want to read more about any of these:

From 2013:

From 2014:

From 2015:

Adobe Photoshop CC 2016 on a Wacom Cintiq Companion 2. About 6–8 hours, I think. 

Algerian Girl

Every now and then I do portraiture demonstrations. People prefer to see portraiture being demonstrated, I find: they can see exactly what I am trying to do, and judge how well I am doing. If I'm illustrating only I know what it's supposed to look like! I've tried demonstrating illustration, but it never goes down so well.

This is one of my demonstration portraits. In previous years I've always done actors and actresses, but I saw a 19th century photograph of an Algerian girl and thought it was beautiful, so I used that. 

I started it for demonstration purposes in October 2015, and only finished it up in October of this year, so I could enter it in a show (I won first in portraiture!!). 

Here are some progress shots, all taken while I was working and posted on Instagram. Some of them are a bit fuzzy, I was quickly snapping shots with my phone between chatting to people, and the lighting was pretty poor:

1.5 hours in:

2.5 hours in:

3.5 hours in:

4.5 hours in:

That was the end of my demonstration time - after that I switched to needle felting.

Here she's almost finished:

Graphite on sketchbook paper 20cm diameter, 8-10 hours in total. If you'd like a rundown of all the materials I use in pencil portraiture, I have a list here.

Here's the original photograph:

Source: Matthew's Island of Misfit Toys

Baby Cards

Babies always seem to come in clusters, don't they? Here are two baby cards I've completed recently:

This one is for Jemima:

I did the illustration in ink with watercolour highlights so it could count towards Inktober (at which I am woefully behind) as well:

And this one is for Xavier. I had a photo of him to work from, so did a miniature watercolour portrait for this card:

Here's a video I took of me painting this little portrait:

Putting together a quick #baby card this afternoon 😄 #wip #workinprogress #artistsoninstagram #art #paint #painting #video #timelapse #hyperlapse #artistatwork #watercolour #watercolour #newborn

A video posted by Alison Mutton (@alene.art) on Sep 11, 2016 at 12:41am PDT

Benji

Recently I've been doing quite a few pet portraits - which is fine by me, pet portraits are always fun!

Here is one of them - Benji the Boston Terrier. Isn't he gorgeous?

I do my pet portraits in mixed media, I just find that easier when I'm dealing with lots of fur, I can add extra texture easily, and, more importantly, quickly. This keeps the time I spend, and therefore the prices, down, for my clients. 

I took a lot of photos, sharing my progress on Instagram so that my client (who uses Instagram) could see my progress regularly. Some of my process shots were shared in my Instagram Story - so if you follow me on Instagram, check out my Story posts to see extra sneak peeks and progress shots that don't make it into my gallery!

Starting the inking. I'm using Copic Multiliners in 0.1 and 0.05:

This is my least-favourite part of any pet portrait. Animals look really weird without their eyes and noses shaded, and I'm always terrified that it's going to look awful and I'll have to start all over again:

That's better! Eyes and nose to start!

First pass with the watercolour. I'm using Ecoline in black for the main areas, because it's nice and black, and then using Winsor & Newton watercolours on top:

Almost finished. After I was done with the watercolour I went in with coloured pencils for a bit more texture and contrast:

And the final product! I had a slight accident right at the end - I opened my jar of Ecoline to do a touch-up, and there was a huge bubble in the top.... which popped and spattered all over my desk. I was frozen in horror for a while, as there were now black spots on my 99.9% completed pet portrait. Black spots in Ecoline, which has never even heard of 'erasing'. (I'm sure everyone who works traditionally has moments like this. If you're working digitally, I think the best parallel is accidentally pressing 'Do Not Save'. Aaaaarrrrg!!). PSA: If you're using Ecoline and it gets a bubble, rescue your work before it pops!

When I'd stopped hyperventilating, I came up with a solution. Necessity is the mother of invention, and all that. I was already planning on spattering some coloured watercolour, as in this portrait card, so I used my Copic Multiliners to add extra black spatters (somehow I don't trust myself to just fling black ecoline at a painting, even if I can do so with watercolour). The accidental spatters had somehow miraculously missed landing actually on Benji. I think the effect is none too bad, even if it isn't exactly what I originally planned. What do you think?

Can't get enough of Benji? He has his own Instagram!

Copic Multiliners, Ecoline Ink, Prismacolour pencils and Winsor & Newton watercolours on Moleskine watercolour paper. Just under A4 in size. This portrait took 4.5 hours. 

Portrait Card

Here's a commissioned one-off watercolour portrait card that I completed last month. I was given a photo of the girl in question jumping in front of a fountain somewhere in Europe to use as a base. The client wanted enough of the background remaining for the original location to recognisable to the recipient, so I left in the fountain and added a few trees. I also enlarged the girl quite a lot from the original photo, to make her the focus of the card.

It was a difficult format to work from, to fit in a jumping girl and the fountain in the space of a standard ratio greeting card. I would have preferred a longer format so I could have more space below her, but I didn't have an envelope that size. If this was an illustration I would have done things a bit differently, but for a portrait from a specific photo, I kept everything as close to the original as possible. I altered all the colours from the winter photo - from blacks and khakis to more pastel colours - to work with the birthday theme and added some spatters and metallic paint to give the whole thing more fun and energy, along with flicking out the hair and jacket and other artistic-license tweaks. =)   

Four hours using Copic Multiliners, Winsor and Newton watercolours and metallic gold Ecoline on Moleskine watercolour paper.