Some portraits are really two portraits at once. This one began with a photograph taken a few years ago at a festival — a little chihuahua tucked safely on their owner’s lap, with a wash of rainbow hair falling behind them like a curtain of colour. It had that easy, sun-warmed festival feeling, and I wanted the finished piece to hold onto exactly that.
I worked this portrait in soft pastel layered with professional artists’ pencils. The two mediums do very different jobs. The pastel gave me the soft, blended atmosphere — the calm blue background and the sweep of pink, violet and turquoise hair, blended with my fingertips until the colours melted into one another. The pencils came in for everything that needed precision: the fine, directional fur across the dog’s chest, the wet shine of the nose, the tiny catchlights in the eyes.
The coat was the real joy to paint. Chihuahua fur looks simple from a distance, but up close it moves in dozens of directions at once — warm ginger over the back, pale cream down the chest, little flicks of dark around the ears. Building that up stroke by stroke is slow, but it’s the part that makes a portrait feel alive rather than photographed.
Pet portraits are some of my favourite commissions, and this one is a good example of why. They’re never really about the animal on its own. They’re about a bond, a shared moment, a person too — even when that person is only a soft blur of colour in the background. Years from now, this painting will still carry that afternoon.
If you’d like a portrait of your own companion, I take commissions from your photographs — from a single much-loved pet to a portrait that captures a moment between you both. You can start a commission or ask a question over on my https://www.klaudiapolakowska.com/product/custom-pet-portraits-from-your-photos-acrylic-or-oil-paint/.