Drawing Every Dog is a new feature I’ll be updating from time to time. In the 90s and early 2000s I was still buying reference books for things like animal breeds and my shelves were heavy (and still are) with large format hardback tomes such as The Encyclopedia of Dog Breeds by Juliette Cunliffe. Now obviously as the facility of finding good reference images online improved it became logical and frugal to Ask Jeeves search Google images instead of shelling out a week’s rent on a huge book (inflation kids, I’m sorry for the world you’ve inherited) and so it remained for the better part of two decades.
You already know where I’m going with this.
It’s now virtually impossible (no pun intended) to locate decent, trustworthy reference images for anything online any more. Every image search results page is the wastewater grey of generative AI excrescence. I noticed this about 2 years ago looking for some reference images of a T-Rex. Adobe’s stock image library was prominent and displaying something that was vaguely therapod-shaped but had three arms, all far too long. Somehow this image’s existence was deemed appropriate to not only remain in the library but was deemed a good enough example to have a high ranking. Since then it’s only gotten worse to the point that as an artist it’s taking longer and longer to find genuine images in a barren domain of scarcity.
Reader, the books that I kept are coming back off the shelves.
Flicking through the encyclopedia of dogs I remembered how lovely it was to look at a page with no glare or flicker, how my mind would have to interpret detail in relatively low resolution photos that could not be zoomed in on. I decided to get out some paper and pens and draw from the book. It’s like relearning how to draw, or maybe remembering how to. So having done a couple I’ve decided I’m going to take my time and draw every dog in the book. Me, start a project of this size (there are 400 dog breeds) and not finish it? Maybe. My goal is just to enjoy the simplicity of drawing on paper from a photo in a physical book that’s never downloaded an update behind my back or locked me out when it decided it to start charging a fee to flick through the pages. The joy, the simple JOY!
Above is a portrait of the Bracco Italiano breed, drawn in pencil and colouring pencil, on A5 220gsm Windsor & Newton smooth surface cartridge. Also known as the Italian Pointer, it’s in the UK gundog group, the breed came from Piedmont and Lombardy.
More to come! (You’ll also spot many dog breeds in my gift caricatures linked in the main menu above if you have a look!
Previous Caricature Dog Portraits by Allan Cavanagh:
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