I finished my second "commission" for a person on Simbi today. I think it turned out pretty well.

I noticed a request the other day about someone needing a picture of their dog drawn for their small business. I was looking for something to draw so I asked them exactly what they were looking for.

They explained that they wanted to introduce their dog as a co-owner of their business and wanted a cartoon picture drawn up of the dog use. She gave me a picture of the style she was looking for. I'm not going to post it because it's not mine, but it was a pretty basic drawing of a dog with only a few colors. She then gave me two awful pictures of her dog and an example of how the dog should be sitting. I say awful not because the dog was ugly or the pictures were terrible, more because the dog was in a horrible position to figure out the actual size and shape of the dog as well as the pattern on his fur. The dog was mostly black but he had brindle legs and there really wasn't a clear shot of exactly what the pattern was.

Click on the photo's to see the larger size.

The first thing I did was try and make a layout so I could capture the character of the dogs face combined with the pose example.

Then I sketched out the main features and added a rough envelop (which she wanted in the drawing) to send to her and make sure it was the right idea for what she wanted.

I then inked in the lines. This process actually took me a long time. All the lines are hand drawn. They aren't vectors the are drawn in and smoothed out with the eraser tool in PhotoShop. After this drawing I'm thinking about adding Adobe Illustrator to my subscription. It would make things much faster if I do more of this in the future.

This is the final inking of the photo. I made some changes today to try and make the dog look happier. He's got some sad looking puppy dog eyes so I tried adding a little bigger smile along his mouth and some happyish eyebrows today to try and cheer him up. I found out, to make a dog look really happy he needs to have a big open mouth smile with the tongue hanging out. Otherwise their eyes will always look sad.

After the long inking process I added the first base color. Her dog is black so I tried to get his fur dark while at the same time keeping him light enough to keep it looking good.

I then added the brindle color as best as I could going off the pictures she supplied. It was a little challenging to make a brindle looking fur with only one other solid color but it turned out okay. I also added the darker shadows to give the dog more depth, drew up a quick envelope and sent the drawing to see if it was still what she was looking for. You can see in this photo compared to the inking and the next one that the dog has no eyebrows and isn't smiling as much. He does look a little sad.

Like I had mentioned, she wanted the dog to look a little happier so I tweaked around with it a little bit today. I also added the highlights along the dog's left side and a few other little details and tweaks. Still a little sad looking because....well....puppy dog eyes look sad without a real smile.

Once I had finished I sent a few different sized drawings with and without the bottom shadow under the dog.

She wrote me a great review on Simbi and also asked if there was somewhere else she could write me a review.

Guess What I Asked Instead?

I told her to sign up to steemit and that would be better than any review I could get. Hopefully she does and can leave a reply at the bottom of this post.

Recruiting From Simbi

I've been surfing around Simbi the last few days and I keep noticing people making requests that could be solved from steemit. Weather it's promoting their business, selling their artwork, or getting people to check out their YouTube page. Any time I see something like that I send them a message telling them about the awesomeness of steemit.

So far I can confirm that there are at least 2 people that have signed up in the last few days from my messages on Simbi. There is @thisismein360vr who has some amazing 360 deg videos on YouTube. And, there is @elementm who saw my public post about joining Steemit before it was taken down. Hopefully their are others, I just can't confirm.

Check out their posts and give them a welcome.