Sadie the four headed dog

My Girl wanted to be in the picture so I took one of her with Sadie, the four headed dog.  Sadie doesn't really have four heads, but I did do a four headed paper cut picture of her.  Sadie is my friend's aging family member and she wanted a portrait of her for her home. 

I had been thinking of doing something a little bit Andy Warhol and she loved the idea. Most of my paper cut work has been pretty monochromatic so this was something very different.  Sadie is basically a black and white dog but I like to keep the art all about light and shadows so I had a highlight and shadow for both the black and the white parts.  That made four colors, except that each dog has a different shadow color for the white parts, so that's seven, eight when you add in the eye color, and twelve including the different background colors.  That's a lot of different colors that each had to be just right.  We spent a fair amount of time picking just the right paper for this project, but that's part of the fun.  Unfortunately the photos didn't really capture the true colors.  So imagine the white actually white, the black dark, and the rest warm bright earthy colors.  The dog on the upper right should be sagey green not khaki.




Sketching it all out, choosing the colors, and the first dog or two were fun.  Then it started to get a little tedious.  I think the end result is good, but I don't know if I'll have the patience for another repeat picture like this again.  Maybe if it was my own dog, but I don't have a dog so it's not going to happen.