Black Lab Pet Portrait PanPastel, Pastel Pencil, and Soft Pastel

There are some pet portraits that I really look forward to. Not necessarily because I think the pet is especially cute (…to be fair, they often are), but because there’s something special that stands out to me in a reference photo. Hugo’s portrait is one of those that I was looking forward to for some time, mainly because of the snow and droplets scattered around his face. It adds something to the portrait and really gives the viewer a picture of what was happening at the time.

For Hugo’s pastel portrait, I actually used all types of pastels that I have! I chose to use PanPastel to build up the base layers of his coat. If you’ve followed my work for a while or met me at events, you probably know that I really, really love PanPastel. You can find a couple examples of my PanPastel work by visiting my posts on my saluki portrait, great blue heron piece, and American crow piece. Hugo’s coat would be somewhat similar to the American crow as he is a black labrador retriever.

One thing I really prefer doing is to pick out my PanPastel colors before I start working. I study my reference photo and decide which colors I intend to use based on what I see. I generally want my base layers to hit the predominant color for that area and I sometimes layer colors depending on what I see. I don’t want my PanPastel to be drastically lighter or darker than the tone I’m looking for, though I will sometimes create a slightly darker base layer in order to put fur highlights over the top with pastel pencils. You can see my selection of PanPastel colors for this piece in this photo. The colors I used the most were blues, violets, Payne’s grey, and black.

One thing I loved about Hugo is his eyes in the reference photo — they have amazing reflections where you can see the sky as well as the person taking the photo. It contrasts so beautifully against his orange/brown eyes and I loved that. Hugo’s mom says she got him when he was about 5 months old. It wasn’t exactly planned, but turned out to be a great decision! I can relate as I didn’t really intend to adopt another dog either time with my existing dogs. Donnie was adopted because I fell in love with her after meeting her through her foster parents when they watched my other dog for me. Dylan was adopted because Donnie was incredibly depressed after my prior dog had passed away. She lit up when meeting Dylan and we hadn’t seen her so happy in weeks. We fell in love with Dylan pretty instantly as well. None of it was planned, but it all worked out so well in the end.

For Hugo’s portrait, there was one small challenge, which involved switching out the collar and tags from the reference photo for his newer collar and tags. This is something that I often do — either removing collars, halters, and bridles, or exchanging them for collars and/or tags that people like better or have more of an attachment to. I used two additional photos to get an idea of what his collar and tag looked like and then I tried to adjust them to fit with the lighting provided in the original reference photo.

As I mentioned in the beginning, the snow really drew me to Hugo’s reference photo. I decided to tackle the snow and droplets using Unison Colour soft pastels in a variety of violet tints followed by pastel pencils for the droplets or to shape the snowflakes and give them any necessary shadows. I had the chance to practice this technique beforehand when I tackled the pronghorn portrait in late 2019. The violet tones in differing values really help to give the snowflakes some shadow areas, where the snow may be melting slightly or highlight areas where there may be larger chunks of snow together on top of the fur.

Hugo’s mom says that he is truly such a sweet and mellow dog who loves everyone he meets. I learned something while reading about him as she mentioned that his best buddy is a “taco terrier” and Hugo is incredibly gentle with him. I thought…surely, that MUST be a typo or autocorrect. Right? But when I searched the term, I found out taco terrier is the name for a chihuahua and toy fox terrier mix! So, I’ve learned something new today. Taco terrier is a thing.

I hope you’ve enjoyed seeing photos of my process with Hugo’s portrait! Hugo will be available as a notecard design in the future and you can always find that in my shop. If you are interested in commissioning your own pet portrait, please visit my custom portraits page or send me a message!