Just Sketching

I'm on the hunt for inspiration at the moment. Although we are getting some much needed rain, these grey days are taking the wind out of my sails. I did find the cutest photo of two cats snuggling together on Paint My Photo, posted by Kathleen and I decided to use it for a sketch. Lately I've been using tracing paper in place of drawing paper just in case I like the sketch enough to pursue it further and decide to transfer it to working paper. Tracing paper is cheaper than good drawing paper, it can be drawn on easily enough and holds up to erasing remarkably well plus there's no need to trace my drawing, then turn around and transfer it to my working paper. It saves a step.

The challenge here was to fix an area of the larger cat's face where it meets the head of the kitten. In the photo the eye closest to the viewer is kind of smooshed and distorted so it needed some tweaking. Once again, I'm posting this mostly for my own benefit to see if my changes 'read' correctly.

Sydney the Golden Retriever~WIP

From looking at the other photos of Sydney I noticed her eyes were quite large so I increased the size here which also worked to lessen the distortion. I enlarged the width of the top of her head, too. I also fixed the flash bulb eyes. Now to sort out the light source.

My working reference photo

My niece Kali's Golden Retriever, Sydney recently passed away quite unexpectedly and she requested a portrait. She had some nice large file photos of Sydney for me to reference which will help greatly. She also hoped I could paint Sydney with her mouth open which apparently was her normal expression. We had a Golden when the kids were little and he always had his mouth open in a perpetual goofy grin so it must be a Golden 'thing'. Kali provided me with one shot of her dog with her mouth open but the camera distortion wasn't going to make a nice portrait IMO so I'm sorting that problem out first. The photo was taken fairly close to the dog's face making the nose look too large, the eyes and head too small. It was also taken indoors with a flash so I'd like to change the light source. I don't want to lose the angle of the shot completely, just lessen it a bit.

This is a very rough sketch and I'm posting it mainly for my own purposes. I can spot things on screen I often miss IRL.