Art Wortd Coop

A Word About Proofing:
Here at Art Paw I show my clients a variety of proofs to choose from. A few years back when I had to create a web page for each proofing page along with large, small, and thumbnail sized images for each sample I only offered 4 or 5 proofs to review. This was largely due to the time involved in creating the pages. Today we use a service by Smug Mug for proofing and the web production process is much quicker. For this reason I now show around 10 samples. This is far more than most quickie digital service providers will show their customers.
Sometimes I will show even more than 10 if I am not sure what my client wants. Dotty's human had requested pinks and pastels. I am not the queen of pastels and so I experimented creating some new grounds and ended up with around 19 samples for review. Around 12 of those had different background options.

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About Art Direction:
I love it when clients do tell me what colors they are wanting to see and I will keep those colors in mind as I am working. I do not allow this information to totally restrict my creativity and will often show something that may be totally not on their list of colors while still showing several proofs that do follow their recipe. On several occasions I have had clients pick deep reds or blues when that was not what they thought they wanted originally.
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About Photo Quality:
I know I sound like a broken record, and yet the higher the resolution is and the better quality the original photo is the better the final portrait. Sometimes our subjects are no longer around and clients may be limited on the photos they have to choose from. Keep in mind that I can work from just about any image. All of the images in this post were very workable and fun to play with. I was able to work with an actual photo on Dotty and so I scanned it in really high. Her image quality was stated as "fair" because even scanned at a high resolution she was a bit grainy and lacking in detail. This was not too big of a problem however because her smile and that crazy "fly away ear" totally charmed me and made me eager to paint in additional detail as needed. She was also pretty well lit and that made a positive difference. We have a photo tips page on the site if you are thinking about shooting for a custom pet portrait.