Sun Dog - an exercise in polymer painting

My husband and I are owned by a canine sun worshiper. I love to take photos of my fur-faced baby, and one of the photos I took just this week spawned part of my inspiration for the challenge piece of the month. I have been wanting to do a portrait of this guy (and one of my dear departed cats), and this challenge gave me great opportunity to tackle the idea, at least of my pup... kitties to be done at another time!

This month, our theme is "Interpretation". Our guild's challenge coordinator (Arlene Harrison) chose the artist, from whom we would all chose a painting and then create our own homage. Arlene chose one of her favorite artists, Wyatt Waters, a watercolorist. Waters' style is that of realistically rendered images, most of his subjects are everyday life or small town America, and his color style I would describe as a vibrant primary-based mixed hues. You can find Waters' Facebook page here to check out more of his lovely paintings. 

Waters' painting of my choosing, was one which he did of his dog, and it is entitled "James". I've taken the liberty of posting a copy of his image of this sweet painting, which you can also find in his gallery of paintings on his Facebook page.

James Watercolor painting by Wyatt Waters

This challenge piece was a bit rushed, it all came together, from inspiration to final product, in 2 days.  I'm in the midst of another studio reorganize, and busy with the garden, among other things... so, I almost wasn't going to make a piece. But, I really hated to break the now (I think) 2 year running streak of creating a challenge piece every month. I had decided that if I was going to tackle this challenge, I wanted to do a polymer painting. I wanted to take my inspiration from the subject and style of Waters' painting, but I wanted to use my own image. I had just taken some great photos of my fur-baby, while he was sitting in the sun on our lounge chair, and thus the idea for this month's project was in place. 

I used a piece of glass, covered with LPC to block out the colors of my puppy, and his chair, in alcohol inks. After baking the first layer of this, I peeled it off the glass and realized that I liked the clarity of the side that was against the glass, so I placed it back on the glass and built up more layers on the side that was originally supposed to be the viewing side. The only problem with this is that my painting is now a reversed image of the original. I used artistic license to omit certain things from the original photo, to simplify the image (also because of my time constraint).

Because it was rushed, I'm not as happy with it as I had thought I would be, especially the fact that it is the reversed image of the original. But all-in-all I am pleased with the lessons learned in this project. And as always, I hope to do more with this technique in the future. Here's a close-up of my sundog:

I'd love to hear your thoughts on this project, leave me a comment below! Voting for this challenge opens on October 1st and will run through to the 7th at midnight EST. I'll post a reminder here on the blog... Here's one more shot, from an angle, of my sundog: