The spirit animal portrait for this Finnish lady is now finished. It took a lot longer than expected and caused a fair bit of frustration.

Pirjo’s animal turned out to be a dog and she told me that her Mom had a white, American Akita that she loved, so I decided to use that for the portrait. This did make the portrait even harder, though, since it was a blonde woman and a white dog.

It was a real challenge to make but challenges can be fun

I initially sketched it out on paper that didn’t take water and tried to create it in a dry medium. That didn’t work very well, and I had to start from scratch. With my low level of patience, that was annoying 🙂

In the end, I created the portrait by blocking in the colours in watercolour and then adding the details and shading using coloured pencil.

Now it’s your turn. Pick one of the buttons below and click it