Labels for the honey jars, and steps to an acrylic dog portrait

It was important to my husband to have special labels for his honey jars. So he asked the family to make some for him.  

The grand fairies did some drawings, I painted our dog, Honey, and we used a mix of the designs on the bottles, front and back.

That man LOVES his dog, and our anniversary was this week (32 years!), I figured I could combine label making with creating a gift for him all in one dog portrait.  

This is the photo Honey posed for. I held up a treat to get her to look up to the point where a bee would fly above her in the painting.  

She seemed disappointed when her modeling session was over, she was enjoying the treats.

First, I did a value sketch over the pencil drawing.

Then I started on the eye.

The layers started to build up next and the eye got more detail.

At this point, it was almost done, all that it needed was fine tuning, the little hairs that gave it depth and texture.  I chose my background color to compliment the blue that the girls used in their own art.

The final step makes a big difference, doesn't it?

After scanning the designs, I sized them and printed pages of the pictures onto matt photo paper, cut them out and glued them to the bottles.   

oh no!!!  

How could I have spent about 8 hours staring at the dog photo and painting her from it and not notice that her tags are missing???  As I was editing this post, it popped out at me that she has no tags. Dang, I just bought new ones for her before we went on vacation last month.  Looks like I need to make another one.  She is not going to get a sparkly, rhinestone one this time. She gets the cheapo, plain style if she isn't going to appreciate the nice one and take care of it.