Painting the Dog's Coat in a Pet Portrait

"So right now we have a bit of a blank spot where our dog's going to be. And there are a couple of reasons for this. This is the object that is basically nearest to the viewer, so we've saved it for last. Also, just basically we're going to be shifting gears here, and the rest of the paints have been much more colorful which, actually while muted, they still have like, you know, greens, yellows, browns, reds. The dog in contrast is going to have very minimal color, because this is a gray Schnauzer. So we need to match and mix up some gray paint. I have put a small amount of black paint on my palate here, not a lot. It's very easy for black to dominate. We do not want to have a charcoal black Schnauzer; we're going for a very light gray base coat. So it's just a little bit of black, and a lot more of white. Going up here, snagging some white, putting it down here. Just a little bit of black, see how little that is? It's not much at all! Put it in here in the white, and then start to mix together. Mix until it's uniform. We want a nice, light gray. And you can see we've largely got it. Now, this is also going to be a thin layer of paint, which means I've poured some more medium. Don't use the old medium up here. it has a bunch of other pigments in it. At this point, we want to be much more pure. Put the medium in there, mix it in there, the paint's going to thin out immediately. And now, we're ready to start applying our base layer. Next, taking a medium-sized flathead, let's start applying this layer to our doggie. And you're going to notice right away, wow, that's faded. I mean, can you - you can only barely tell the difference between the faded part of the gray we just applied, and just the white of the canvas. It's actually easier to tell by painting over some of our old marks, if the paint's actually there. This is okay; this is intended to be a very faint base coat. If you feel it's just a touch too light, you can always add a little bit of black to your mixture, and then mix this in. I'm keeping my brush strokes primarily up and down, vertical, trying to follow the general flow of the body for this base layer. I'm coloring everything in, except I'm not trying to color in the collar and the doggie tags. I'm leaving those, for the most part, untouched. But the rest of the doggie is all going to be colored in this gray base layer."