Carol's dawing technique
Different moods
Carol offered a range of options to customers for her drawings. This is how she desribed them:
"You may like to have two, three or four images of your pet on the page, so that several of his or her moods and looks are represented. A lounging pose, perhaps, alongside a head portrait, and a big jump! It’s all possible.
"Similarly, it’s sometimes nice to have two pets, who share their lives in real life, appearing together on the page. Whatever combinations you require, I can give you."
About Carol's drawing
» Carol writes about her technique
This is how Carol described her approach to drawing on her Impetuous Portraits website:
You'd hate to watch me at work! It’s a slow process. I start with what may look like a loose sketch: but in fact I’ve very carefully given it its proper dimensions and placed it in the correct position on the page. Then I usually build up the image gradually with many, many fine pencil strokes.
Occasionally I use fewer pencil strokes than you might imagine, and instead achieve the appropriate coat texture by means of shading and highlighting which, when looked at from only a few centimeters away, gives exactly the effect that's needed. I like the fact that this is a pencil portrayal on a page, not a photograph!
However, I do of course base the drawing extremely closely on one particular photograph (the customer's choice, of course, unless they want to leave that to me). And I’ll also bring to bear what characteristics I can glean from any other photos they might have given me for reference. These are often very useful.
In this way I try to get right under the skin of the subject, bringing out subtleties that you'd hardly be aware of yourself. I hope to end up with a kind of hyper-real image that somehow is still absolutely true to the original. My hope is that the owner will instinctively smile in recognition when they set eyes on the drawing.
As you will have seen, I tend to focus purely on the main subject. I go for a plain, unadorned "look" – the pencil image appearing on a white background. If people particularly want me to include specific details of context, I can of course do that, but I think the effect of the pencil picture with a plain setting tends to work really well, and helps give the pictures a distinctive, uncluttered character.
