Wilde About Animals Custom Pet Portraits -- Digital Painting

These are everyone's first questions, naturally:

"Is it just a photo made to look like a painting?"
"Is it just Photoshop filters?"
"Can something done on the computer really be called a painting?"

My answers to these questions—no, no and yes--will require a couple of explanations, first the simple one, then a slightly more technical one to follow...

Simply put:
I call my pet portraits paintings because, unlike scanned and filtered photographs, they're not produced with the touch of a few buttons— on the contrary, like traditional paintings done in watercolor, acrylic or oil on canvas, my portraits are produced stroke by individual stroke, starting from a blank page and building up to a finished work only through the addition of layers and layers of sketching and blocking, of shading and coloring, through a steady application of more and more detail, until I finally finish the likeness with some sharper strokes of a colored pencil to bring out the finest details and highlights.

My portraits, in other words, start from scratch, and achieve their effect only through a gradual accumulation of literally thousands of brushstrokes.

Which brings us to another question,
and a slightly more technical explanation of what my paintings are: the term brushstroke just doesn't make sense in relation to computers and digital images, does it? Well, it does if you use an electronic drawing tablet and stylus, and this is the key to my whole painting process: through the absolute magic of this pressure-sensitive device, I can draw and paint brushstrokes in hundreds of different styles, varying size, texture, diffusion, density, saturation, and on and on… I always think of my drawing tablet as the equivalent of having an entire art supply store in my closet—though it’s much neater, thank god...

For those who are interested in sample paintings and prices,
I invite you to explore my Portrait Gallery, where you can see a number of samples of my work—please click on any image to access larger views, detail views, and comments about the subject, style and pricing of each painting

For those who are interested in finding out more about my painting process, you will soon be able to visit my Process page, where I will show the development of a painting from start to finish. Stay tuned!

.And please, whenever you get the urge, send me your feedback!