Tips for Painting Pet Portraits

"The final comparison between our original photograph and our oil painting reveals several changes or liberties I took with the subject matter. While I described these in the painting steps I also thought it was important to cover those here. For example, on these bookshelves here there's only two shelves and they're chocked full of books. In here, I've actually gone up one extra shelf and I do not have any books on them. Why is that? Well, there are two reasons. First off, in terms of balance, I'm assuming this bookshelf keeps going up because I have a little bit more space on my painting above my subject than the photograph shows. You don't always have to treat the border of the photograph to be the perfect border of your painting. There are room to have things, make sure your painting doesn't come across as too claustrophobic. That's why I added some height. I took out the books because while I wanted to have the bookshelf as a nice background object, I didn't want there to be too many books and busyness going on here. Too much chaos. I could have painted in some very sedate, mute looking books, but I just figured, basically, not to have them at all. Likewise with the chair pattern. This is much more similar except I changed where the chair leg comes down closer to the dog to get a little bit more of a spacial connection between these two because I don't want the chair to be the closes thing to the view in the foreground. What's more, I also removed the pattern you can see here in the picture that's not in here. Again, I didn't want that extra little bit of busyness. I wanted these objects to be here, the dog to be part of the environment, but not for the environment to dominate the dog. I wanted the dog to remain the emphasis of the painting."