A Bit Like William Hague

So this one, like "And a Small Hat" before it, started life as a speedpaint. Unlike the previous piece this one was finished and posted before I decided to go back and fix "just that one bit." In fact you've already seen the speedpaint in the previous post, but you'll see it again below.
The end result of all this was one of the best pieces I think I've ever done, it just worked out really well.

Click to Enlarge

It started out back when I was looking for something to paint on Deviant Art. Often the way I do this is just a random search (or no search) with the parameters set to Stock Art and Newest. This little chap popped up on the first page and I thought it was nice, so I clicked the thumbnail and opened this picture of a French Bulldog. I immediately knew I had to paint him, though I had no thoughts beyond it being a quick speedpaint at the time.

Unusually for me I saved the speedpaint several times through that first hour. This was because in retrospect I really wished I'd done the same for the Han Solo one I'd done previously. That worked out because now you can see the progression to that first point.

So I posted it in my usual places and went about with my day, but unlike most speedpaints this one kept nagging at me. I'd managed to mess up the eye and I knew it, but ran out of time before I could do much about it.

"I could just go back and fix that eye," I thought, "no time limit." So at the end of the day when my son was in bed I went back and did just that. Spent longer than I'd meant to (despite the "no time limit" thing) and put an hour or so into his eye and the surrounding area, which resulted in this...

Which looked really good. I probably could have left it there and still been happy with it - the focus is drawn to the eye allowing the rougher parts to simply inform the brain and let it do the work (unless you look right at them of course). I couldn't leave it though, I had to go and fix the snout...

Then the mouth...

Then the ear...

And at that point the upper head was polished enough that I had to give at least some love to the rest of him, but intended to keep the lower half rough, even if not quite as rough as it was at the time.

I had quite a bit of trouble with the neck here. Getting the right balance of bounce light and the right level of detail in the fur turned out to be the hardest thing in the entire painting. In fact I kept working on it through the next step.

Here I've blocked in the rest of the body - it's low detail as the eye isn't supposed to focus there at all. I've also added in all the little hairs that stick out all over the place. There are a few around the snout of course, but also a lot of them around the inside of the ear. I've begun to polish up the background here too. I quite liked the colours (although I did describe them to my wife as being "a bit like baby poo"), but I've had the same basic background since the beginning and I've grown tired of it, so at this point I wanted to alter it a little.

After this I muted the colour a little in the background (same colours, just desaturated) and then dripped some of my "splats" on it with the brush I still have left over from the card I did for my best friend, before smearing them a little to give a sort of dripped watercolour look to it. I think the only other thing I did was add eyelashes and sign it.

I'm still not 100% happy with it (am I ever?) but I do believe it's probably the best piece I've done thus far, so I'm still showing some progress.

Why is the post called "A bit like William Hague"?  It's because someone joked that it looked like him, and you know what? He really does!  Is it ironic the the British Foreign Secretary looks like a French Bulldog?  I'll let you decide (it so is).

Finally, since I didn't upload this one at it's full resolution, here's a snippet of the picture as it was originally painted: