Thanksgiving and a Panda

 

My dog, a large Akita who takes his guard dog responsibility very seriously, sat next to me as I was trying to relax on the couch. When I looked at him, I thought he had the look of a panda!

 

So, decided to see how a panda-dog would look if I painted one on rabbit skin.

Here is the starting point – the dark areas around the eyes may not be authentic panda shape, but I had to work with the size and texture of the cottontail rabbit skin.

 

The colour of the eyes is as close as I could come to my dog’s eye colour by mixing oil and acrylic paint. I thought my new creature had happy eyes!

 

Trying to stay minimalistic with the paint, I shaded the area around the snout with a pencil to give a slight visual bump and depth to the flat ‘canvas”. Then added the tip of a hare tail atop to fill in the gap of the original rabbit skin.

 

To stay minimalistic with the framing as well, I used a double glass frame so I can also show that I paint on the hide and keep the fur on the reverse.  When framed with a solid back, this detail cannot be seen and many of my viewers have asked what I do with the fur. Well, nothing – I just preserve the hide and the fur and let the edges of the hide show that unique character the fur can give as a natural contour.

And that is my Panda-dog painting for this Thanksgiving…

 

November 24, 2021

© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2021

 

PS/ Actually on Valentine’s Day I painted a gender-free portrait on a similar size rabbit skin. I did not frame it to show the fur and the hide as an integral natural material for all my work (https://vaheark.blogspot.com/2021/02/twinkle-twinkle-little-star-how-we.html)

I got a lot of interest and feedback about that painting from readers of my blog, and now that work has found a new home. But since I liked that intriguing portrait, I decided to paint another one (I very rarely paint the same theme), as close as I could come to duplicating the original by looking at the pictures I had taken.

This one is smaller and has more fur around the face. It almost looks like a portrait of a soldier from yesteryear wearing a ceremonial hat.... 

 

But, it is another painting I finished on a holiday and this one will stay on my wall.