Day 20: Dog

Holy Mary, mother of Christmas, drawing dogs is way harder than anything else. This might have something to do with the fact that they are my very favorite animal, or that there are approximately 7 billion different kinds of dogs, or that my current dog is a terrible model and also white, which is a hard marker color to find. Anyway, after about 100 attempts of everything from cartoon dogs to realistic portraits, here's a sketch of Olive:

She's my real-life dog, and that's her favorite position, which we call the "Falcor." She is afraid of cameras, sleeps about 20 hours a day, is 90% deaf and half blind so she does smart things like take flying leaps at the couch and bounce off of the laundry basket she didn't know was there. Also, if I leave the room and she wakes up to find me missing, she will run around and around and around the apartment looking for me, often passing me several times in the process. When we adopted her, she had been in foster care for several months, and her foster mommy was a big fan of dog clothes, so she has a large collection of pink doggy dresses and sometimes I think she wonders why she never gets to wear them anymore. When we were back in Minnesota last week, she terrorized my parents' beagle Bonnie by following her everywhere and sniffing her butt nonstop.

Tomorrow is "flamingo," at which point I promise to have a real finished drawing... assuming I can find an adequate pink pen, or justify a green flamingo.

Check out Flickr and Paper Sparrow, where I'm sure people have actually drawn complete dogs!