Painting colorful dogs in acrylics is a fun way to bring personality and vibrancy to your pet portraits. Whether you’re a beginner picking up a brush for the first time or an experienced artist looking to loosen up your style, these painting techniques are sure to help you. In this tutorial, I’ll walk you step by step through my colorful painting process, from sketching the outline of the dog to choosing bold, eye-catching color palettes that make your pet pop out from the canvas.
I highly recommend watching the video below, where I walk you through each step in detail and show the full painting process from start to finish, including color choices, sketching techniques, painting fur texture and more!
If you want to learn exactly how to paint the colorful cockapoo from this video, the full length real time tutorial is available on my Patreon, along with all of my other colorful animal painting tutorials.
Acrylics are incredibly versatile, making them perfect for experimenting with bright colors and playful techniques. Instead of sticking to traditional browns and blacks, we’ll explore how to use color creatively. I love painting with vibrant colors to add a sense of fun to an animal painting, which is perfect for dogs!
By the end of this tutorial, you’ll have the tools and inspiration to create your own colorful pet portraits that stand out and feel uniquely yours. You can use these techniques to paint any colorful animal, from dogs, to cats, to elephants and more!
Let’s get painting
To begin your dog painting you can start by lightly sketching the outline of your dog onto your canvas. This ensures that the proportions are correct so that the finished painting will look just like your pup.
There are a few techniques to do this, including sketching freehand, tracing and the grid technique. I’ve added some video tutorials for these sketching techniques below:
Grid Technique:
This grid technique splits your reference image into smaller squares, allowing you to focus on just one small square at a time. This helps to keep the proportions of your pet in place, while also making it easy to scale your painting up or down.
Tracing Technique:
This tracing method is a simple way to get the outline of your pet onto your canvas quickly and easily. You can trace straight from a screen like your iPad or tablet, without having to use a printer. It’s perfect for smaller pet paintings.
Learning values:
Before choosing your colors for your dog painting, it’s important that you understand values. Values are how light or dark a colour is. If you turn your reference photo black and white, you can easily see the values, as we can see the darkest and brightest areas of the animal without being distracted by color.
I explain this is much more detail in the video at the top of this page. But essentially, as long as your values match your reference photo (you use dark paint where the shadows are, and light paint where the highlights are) then you can use any color that you want.
Painting eyes:
Even though we are painting a very colorful pet portrait, I always recommend that you choose realistic colors when painting the eyes. Adding random colors to animal eyes can make them look a bit strange, so I find that it helps to make the eyes look realistic, even if the rest of the painting isn’t.
This video below shows you some of my favourite techniques for painting animal eyes:
Choosing colors:
There are a few different ways to choose the colors for your vibrant pet portraits. One is to simply exaggerate the natural colors of your dogs fur, so a tan becomes a bright orange and so on.
Another technique is to use cool colours in the shadows, like blues and purples, and warm tones in the highlights, like yellows and oranges.
This is what I did for this cockapoo painting. The warmer highlights mimic the effect of sunlight, making the colors make sense, even though they are very vibrant.
Fur texture:
There are a few ways to add the furry texture for your dog paintings, and the one you choose will depend on the dog you are painting. This cockapoo has curly fur, so I built the texture up in layers, whilst still adding those bright colors.
I have written a tutorial showing you how to paint curly fur, as well as shiny fur and white fur. So check those out to help with your fur texture painting!
Painting colorful dog portraits in acrylics is all about letting go of strict realism and embracing creativity and fun color choices.
If you’d like to learn more, the full-length tutorial for the colorful cockapoo featured in this post is available on my Patreon, where I guide you through every step in real time so you can paint along with me at your own pace.
I hope this tutorial has inspired you to pick up your paintbrushes and try your own colorful dog painting!
