I love dogs and I love art.
Creating dog art allows me to combine both of these passions.
My dog art process begins by taking lots and lots of dog photos. Most of the time, I engage in opportunistic photography. If I spot my dogs doing something funny, endearing, strange, or artistic, I quickly grab my digital camera and snap as many pictures as I can.
When I am outside the house, I rely on my iPhone.
Occasionally, I will have a specific artistic goal in mind. In these cases, I set up the necessary props, get my dogs into position using treats, and take many dog pictures from a variety of angles. Being dogs, they usually will not stay still for the whole process, so there are also many natural pose variations.
For example, I recently created a set of HubPages related dog art. To achieve this goal, I posed puppy Lara in front of my laptop, and just let her naturally model for the camera.
Once I have all the photos, I go through them and pick the ones that I like most. I try to include those with the greatest variation in terms of pose and angles.
Then, I go through each of the selected pictures and remove their background using PhotoShop. Each background removal takes me about 12 minutes, which is why the filtering step above is crucial.
After removing the backgrounds, we are ready to start generating some fun dog art!
Dog Art 1 – Object Art
A great place to put our dog art is on every day objects such as mugs and t-shirts.
In this way, we can enjoy our dogs in a greater variety of contexts. It also allows us to share many unique, and personalized gifts with our friends and family. I love personalized gifts because each one of them tells me a special story about the gift giver.
One of the key challenges in placing dog art on objects, is that there is no standard rectangular boundary. As a result, it is often necessary to create our own frame.
We may explicitly put in a decorative frame (see below), or the frame may just be the natural boundaries of our subject, for example, the natural outline of the dog and computer (see above).
I get most of my decorative frames from the Renderosity art store. The frames usually come as Photoshop brushes or PNG images.
Here are some object art examples that I have created on Zazzle.
Dog Art 2 – Fantasy Art
I am a big fan of fantasy art and backgrounds.
Fantasy art is very creative, and often features perfect beings in magical realms that only exist in our imagination. The scenes are compelling, and usually painted in highly saturated colors.
For example, the dog art pictures at the beginning of this article were created using fantasy backgrounds by Sveva.
Below are several other fantasy pictures I created to make a calendar of my dogs. Dogs always seem magical to me, thus it seems appropriate to see them in these wonderful, fantasy worlds.
Dog Art 3 – The Human Dog
Another popular form of dog art is to depict a dog in human form; in a way that captures the dog’s character. Dogs have become our very close companions, therefore it is natural that our art, stories, and writings would reflect that close human-dog relationship.
Below are the human alter-egos of my two dogs.
Shiba Inu Sephy has a jaunty tail that bobs up and down while he is walking; which always makes me think of him wearing a hat. Sephy also has the fine features, and rich red hair of the Shiba Inu breed. He is very much a rogue and a scamp, but he is loyal and has the heart of an angel.
Siberian Husky Shania has the lovely, dark Sibe mask around her eyes, and is very fluffy all over. She is a very sweet dog, but she is active and always ready for action.
Continuing with the human-dog theme, below is a picture of my Shiba Inu in bad-ass human form, walking a digital dog!
Notice his “I love dogs” t-shirt.
As you can see, the dog art possibilities are fun and endless. Do not be afraid to explore the wild side, and let your creativity run loose.
