Dog Daze
As an artist, I feel it's important to keep the skills sharp by experimenting with different techniques and tools. I've always enjoyed cartooning, plus I have a fair bit of knowledge of imaging programs like Photoshop from my days as a television editor. So I thought I'd combine the two techniques to create a whimsical New-Yorker inspired piece about a busy dog park, a place I'm well familiar with having been owner to several pooches over the years. The piece started out with the empty backdrop, which I painted on a board with acrylics in a pretty conventional manner: I then set out to populate this empty park with as many of the most popular types of dogs I could think of, along with their owners. I researched most common dog breeds, and, using their pictures as reference, sketched them to the best of my ability with pencil and ink (a Sharpie) on an 8 x 10 piece of paper. I photographed them with my camera phone to get them into the digital