Last week I talked about how I was creating a series of fruit illustrations for practice. I quickly got over that trend because, to be quite honest, fruit got boring. Thankfully I still kept up with my practice, this time illustrating something quite different.
Let me start off by saying that I don’t have any pets, but literally all of my friends have at least one dog or cat. This means that I have many pictures of many different animals, all of which are adorable. I decided that I would change things up by illustrating some of these animals just for practice, and as a fun thing to send to my friends.
I started with one of my friend’s dogs, and she loved the way it came out, so I kept going and did illustrations of the other three dogs she has. Her family really enjoyed the pictures, and I had fun making them, so I decided to take my work to social media.
I posted the four portraits I did of the dogs on twitter, and told my followers to contact me if they wanted me to do a portrait of their animals. Within 10 minutes I got 6 requests from some people that I knew, and some that I didn’t. I was expecting one or two, but six was a lot! I got pictures of four dogs, one cat, and one that really surprised me, a ferret!
Over the next few days I got more requests, and I’m really excited to start working on them. It was shocking to me to have so many people respond to my work, and to want their own custom pet portraits, but it’s also really rewarding to see how much they love the finished products.
Here are a few of the pet portraits I’ve made so far
To see more of my work, check out my instagram @samcosta.jpg
