Pet Portrait using Colored Pencils

I'd been in a creative funk for a while. Not a dramatic one, just that low-grade restlessness where you want to make something but can't quite get started. Painting felt like too much (the setup, the cleanup, the whole production of it), and I hadn't landed on anything that felt worth the effort.

Then my coworker showed me a photo of his newly adopted dog, Max. And something clicked.

I'd always wanted to do a full colored pencil pet portrait. There's something about colored pencil that feels made for realism, the control, the layering, the way you can build up texture slowly. So I went for it. Near 9x12, the biggest drawing I'd done in this medium.

Since it was my first time working at this scale, I used the grid method for the sketch. It sounds more complicated than it is, basically drawing a grid over your reference photo and your paper, then sketching one box at a time. Instead of trying to place everything at once, you just ask: what's in this square? Proportion problems mostly disappear. I used my go-to Pentel GraphGear mechanical pencil, and once the sketch was done, I rolled a kneading eraser lightly over the whole thing so the lines went faint. You don't want dark pencil lines competing with colored pencil later, or smudging into the color.

For the actual coloring, I used two different pencil types intentionally. Faber-Castell Polychromos for the initial layers really light pressure, just getting color down and then Prismacolors with more pressure where I wanted smooth blends. The fur was the most interesting part to figure out. Instead of trying to draw every single strand, I looked for the shapes in the fur and filled those in following the direction of growth. The blending does the work. It reads as fur without you having to render every hair. Then I'd go back in with the Polychromos for details, because they hold a fine point well.

I started with the eyes, then the face, then worked outward.

I thought this would take me a week given my schedule. It took three days from sketch to finish.

My coworker loved it, which felt really good. And I was genuinely content with it , which is saying something, because my brain kept hovering over the fur, asking should I add a few more strokes here? Knowing when to put the pencil down is still a thing I'm learning. Probably always will be.