Oil Painting: Laura's Dog

This is a dog painting in oil I recently completed. It is my friend Laura's dog. Laura lives in New York City and has two dogs that she takes out for walks and would, for me, take photographs of them taking a pee.

I finally finished this painting.  It will be used for the cover of a story in The Book of Bartholomew. The story is titled Mental Exercises in which, while walking home from a party, Ned reminisces about a walk with his father and their dog Jingles.  I want to thank Laura for being such a good sport and willing participant.  Although, I did hear that the dogs were a little bit put-out by their part of the project.  Granted they had to go pee anyway, but who would want that posted on a blog?  It is disrespectful.

Keep on using your Artist's Brain - even if it is embarrassing to your pet.

Illustration: Donkey Burger Logo Trials

I recently was creating a logo for Donkey Burger, the fast-food restaurant in The Book of Bartholomew. A donkey was the first order of business. I needed to create a comical donkey head. Below are some trials of different donkey heads. You can see that I had a pretty good beginning and only tweaked hair, mouth, ears and eyes from this point. My first go is the upper left image in the group of eight. I didn't like the hair, so I printed out several incomplete donkey heads and then tried different hair styles.

After I settled on a hair style, I wasn't happy with the ears.  I had one thin ear and one big ear.  They didn't match.  At first I copied and pasted the thin ear to the other side of his head, so they matched.  I didn't quite like this.  Then I created a big ear for the front, to match the one in the back. I liked this better.

Now that I had the donkey head like I wanted it (although I still want to change the eyes slightly) I made it into an official Donkey Burger logo by adding the name, some circles and stars and the tagline. I like "Meat with a Kick," which is safer than the other choice of "Eat My Ass."

This logo will appear on the next published story in The Book of Bartholomew. The story is titled "Lunch Rap," and will be published on March 18 at http://www.bookofbartholomew.com/

I hope you enjoyed this. Keep using your Donkey...ooops!... I mean, your Artist's Brain.