Here is a painting by Mandy Bing, who is relatively new to the Belleville area. She was invited to give a workshop on animal painting last Tuesday at the Belleville Public Library, Parrott Gallery. Every Tuesday morning from 10 -1p.m, the Gallery hosts an "Open painting" session for area artists to get together.
I attended Mandy's workshop and was fascinated to hear about her techniques for making these colourful images of animals -mostly cats an dogs. She went into details of how she deals with the customer when doing a commissioned portrait. She also pointed out that in some ways, painting animals was more difficult than painting people, but that taking life drawing classes helped her a lot.
One way she differs from me considerably in her painting method is the amount of preparation time she spends on each piece. She uses a variety of different photographs and edits some of them with photoshop to play with different colour combinations and edge treatments. She then carefully draws every little detail on her prepared canvas (she uses several layers of gesso first -to get a smooothe effect.). Next, the painting begins with adding exaggerated colours.
