Pet Portraits Diploma Course

The other thing I will be doing in March is a Pet Portraits Diploma course. This course is a home study course run by the London Art College and covers all aspects of Pet Portraits in a variety of mediums - graphite, coloured pencil, pastel, oil and acrylic. Because I have no formal artistic training and am self taught I feel that I am possibly missing out on some basic fundamentals that those who have been trained in art have been taught. I am happy with my graphite and coloured pencil techniques, but as you know I struggle when it comes to painting, so I am hoping this course will be able to help with this. The tutor of the course is Pet Portrait artist Melanie Phillips and I will get one-to-one guidance on my artwork that is submitted as part of the exercises.

I actually signed up for the course over a year ago, but with one thing and another never got started. Now I have the time to give my full attention to it and the London Art College have kindly given me an extension on the deadline for finished work, so I am getting started. The first section concentrates on the fundamentals of drawing - tone, texture, composition etc and the exercises are still lifes. I have to admit I am finding it hard work to get motivated to draw fruit and plants - it's like doing GCSE homework! Anyway - here is the first drawing for the first set of exercises. Hopefully i will finish the other two for this set in March and be able to send them off for my critique.