Mallard Ducks - Color Throwdown Challenge CTD307 - Acrylic Painting Portrait of Two Ducks in Green, Blue and Yellow

I finished painting my pair of mallard ducks and thought I'd submit them to this week's Colour Throwdown challenge.

The challenge seems to be geared towards stamping and cardmaking, but I think this is okay. I plan on printing my small artworks onto greeting cards anyway, so I guess it still counts as card making, in a way.

"Mallard Ducks", CTD307, Acrylic Paint on Paper, 6x6

Getting the green right was pretty tricky. There's another shade of green under this one that was way too dark. It's still not quite the shade from the challenge, but mallard ducks are a little bit darker than that anyway. Hopefully doing these colour challenges will be a good way to practice colour mixing, rather than just mixing up something I hope will go with what is already on the page.

Don't forget to follow me on Facebook at Renee Dillon Art or look up ReneeDillonArt on Instagram.

"Dobby the Whippet" - Colourful, Contemporary Acrylic Paint Pet Portrait

This charming little fellow is a whippet I've called Dobby (because of the big, floppy ears, of course). He's the first in a series of small pet portraits I've been working on. I've been wanting to get more into representational painting since I had some success on Austin. I also wanted to see how much water my sketchbook paper can withstand without warping (turns out, very little, but it can be mushed back into shape with a heavy book, so that's nice). 

"Dobby the Whippet", Pet Portrait, Acrylic Paint on Paper, 6x6

I intended to have a bit more purple when I started, but I quite like the bright primary colours together. It's a bit Fauvist. At least, I think that's what the Fauvist movement was about. I was never that into art history, personally. A quick Google images search shows me that I can't be too far off.

I have a bunch of sketches of different animals - dogs, cats, cows, ducks, bunnies, llamas, etc - so expect more animal portraits in the near future, hopefully as delightfully brightly coloured and cheery as this one. 

Work In Progress - Corgi Acrylic Painting

More pet portraits coming up today. I've been working on painting a few at once, and this is my favourite from today's batch. The others...possibly need some work. Maybe. But let's not worry about that right now, let's look at the doggie.

"Pete the Corgi", Work in Progress, Pet Portrait, Acrylic Painting on Paper, 6x6

The colours are a bit less bright in this photo than they are in real life. The orange comes out nicely, but the bluey-green shades on the corgi look a bit faded. I'll take a better picture once I've finished with the lineart and shading. Thinking of going a bit more mixed media with this one and adding coloured pencil or crayon too. Will see how the mood takes me. The other animal portraits I worked on today include mallard ducks, a cow, and an american pitbull terrier.

In other news, I'm super excited that I finally found square, black frames with white matboard for sale in my town. There are a bunch of places that sell standard size frames, but square ones are really difficult for some reason. I would have thought Instagram would have made square photo frames more common by now. But at least I have an option for framing my portraits now. After I've finished painting this little guy I can try it out.

Corgis

One thing I anticipate about starting up a blog and a business selling art is that the beginning will be fairly quiet. The internet is a big place, and content doesn't come up in a search necessarily because it's what you're searching for. What I've learned about Search Engine Optimization so far indicates that there are a lot of little rules to follow if you ever want anyone to find you. Apparently having a free blog rather than a paid website and domain name is a bad start for SEO purposes. Links from other websites (particularly high traffic ones) boost web search ranking. Frequently updating content can apparently help. 

But despite the tiny amount of SEO tips I've learned, I figure I'm still going to have to be pretty patient. Every time I see a new page view on my blog or Etsy shop, I get a little bit excited. It means that a person, even a single person, maybe only for a brief moment, has seen what I've created and acknowledged it in some small way. They might not even like it, but that's not the point. At least someone else in the world knows that it exists.

It's weirdly validating for your efforts to be seen. I could draw every day and keep my art in a box in my bedroom if I wanted to. But I want to share it, as scary as that is. It's like sending a tiny, vulnerable piece of yourself out into the world. Hopefully one day soon I can share my art with more people.

This happy corgi design is one of my favourite papers so far. I need to draw more dog papers.

If you want to see more of my papers or purchase this one, head to Sixth Floor Studio on Etsy. Thanks for looking. :)