I will fully admit, I was sort of scared to take on a custom piece of a friends dog. Up until this point, I was practicing on stock photos, or estimations of what my own dog looked like. These are, of course, safe bets, as I don’t have any visual evidence to counteract this.

This is a lovely little Sheltie that belongs to a friend of a friend. I was using acid free pastel paper for the first time, my new pastel pencils, and hard pastels. She turned out amazingly, and most of the feedback I got about her was positive, so I decided that I could actually branch out and TRY selling things online and at my dog shows.

She was actually difficult, even though I have like… 96 colors in my pastel box, none of them were the sable color that Shelties are known for. So, it took mixing yellows, pinks, tans, and browns to get the color right. I then went back and added yellow color over the muzzle, as it wasn’t light enough, and it didn’t have anywhere near the texture that the rest of the body did.  The background was left plain, though, it was tough for the grays and whites on the left side to pop out, but the blue colored paper really made the sable pop out.

I hope you like her! And I hopes this whole selling thing works out!

This is a custom Sheltie that I did for a friend.