Colored Pencil Dog Portrait of Faeyre

This lovely girl was easy to be inspired by. Her soft steady gaze is part of her calm wise demeanor.
Faeyre is an Australian Shepherd.

Colored pencil is a slow medium. My shortcut for this is using odorless mineral spirits to quickly fill the paper with an underpainting for the pencil layers. I like Mona Lisa Odorless Mineral Spirits, but Gamsol works too.

Much of my work in all media involves an underpainting. Painting and drawing are foundations I always start with.
Colored pencils used: Prismacolor, Faber Castell, Koh-I-Noor. Each brand has a quality I like. This was mostly done in Prismacolor with their soft, buttery rich color letdown. The fine details were done with the harder leads of the Koh-I-Noor and FC.

Prismacolor pencils are wax based. Faber Castell and K.N are oil based. Both dissolve well and blend with each other when the mineral spirits are used. Paper used is Strathmore bristol vellum in a soft white. This colored pencil painting has 6 layers of pencil to achieve depth and richness of color.

I loved painting this lovely girl!










I always make a color swatch to sample the colors I think I might want to use.
The ones with the numbers are the colors I used for this portrait.

• PC = Prismacolor
• FB = Faber Castell
• KN = Koh-I-Noor