Tippy

10x14"
Oil on Canvas

A neighbor asked me to paint a portrait of their dog. Her name is Tippy and she turned 16 this year. She's a wonderful dog and still has a great personality, but she's old and getting sick and probably will not be around much longer. She's also the mother of my dog Fly.
I'm glad that I could provide a way for them to remember her.

This painting is the result of about 4 years of intermittent painting and 6 different attempts in various poses. I was working from several bad photographs, patching things together and trying to portray a realistic local landscape and scale the dog with the cattle in the background in a way that made sense. I still have a lot to learn about landscape painting. I'm going to do a lot of landscape studies before I do something like this again.