Working with poor quality photos.

Not posted in ages have been busy creating new fingerprint tree designs, and hand painted christmas decorations and cards, and more shrinky dink jewellery (will post all later)

My friend Pam wanted a Christmas present for her friends here in Spain, they have 4 dogs and I think at least 3 are rescues!!!! So a lovely gift of all four was ordered, I am so used to people having digital cameras and taking multiple shots of the dogs they want in a painting, that when faced with the challenge of a limited amount, I was really struggling with the film photos I received. As these were not Pam's dogs she only had one chance to get the snaps and they were very dark around the eyes.

Now these little dogs are a real Heinz 57 mix, apart from the boxer so I couldn't even reference other images of same breeds.

The photos I got apart from the podenco (golden dog) were very difficult to see eyes and features. I scanned them and tweaked them as much as I could using photoshops shadow and highlights adjusting the midtone until I could make out a feint outline of the eyes. But the rest was a real challenge!

So here are some of the original photos and the work in progress and the final piece, (shhhhh I love the podenco best) The boxer was the hardest as he was looking down and I had no visual reference for the eyes.


So here are the original pics.......see  what I mean?

So here is the work in progress, as you can see I hit a wall on the boxers eyes......time for a break!

 


And the final four in one piece, I really deliberated adding a wash background, but decided it would look crazy stopping and starting around the dogs so left plain and simple.

 

 

I hope they like it.......and they don't see my blog before Christmas.