Robyn Millar

(Photo: final touches on paintings of ‘Fritz’ [left] and ‘Bruno’ [right] that were completed recently.)

A client contacted me earlier this summer on behalf of her & her sisters to paint a set of Pet Portraits of their mom’s doggies for her upcoming birthday. We actually met through Instagram which is always neat! We got to talking, found out we both live in Calgary (which was super cool because IG is global, so you just never know who you’re going to meet from where!) and she sent me photos of these little cuties, selected which pix she wanted done, and I got paintin’!!

The pair of paintings were given for their mom’s 50th birthday on Friday, and word is she was very happy with them! Which is always exciting of course :). Here are some pictures of the finished pieces:

Fritz the Dachshund dog’s Pet Portrait painting:

‘Fritz’ the dachshund  | 10″x10″ | acrylic on canvas

Bruno the Beagle dog’s Pet Portrait painting:

‘Bruno’ the beagle | 10″x10″ | acrylic on canvas

And as a fellow “Instagram-er” lol, my client encouraged me to post progress pictures of the paintings along the way, which I love to do whenever possible! So periodically I added some “teaser” shots – which was safe to do on IG because their mom is not on there :D. My client and her sisters were able to check out the pix on there without the big birthday gift surprise being at risk, which was super fun! Here are some samples of the progress shots (click on the image to be taken to my Instagram profile, where you can see the pix larger in there that way):

progress shot collages from Instagram

I hear that there are some “doppelganger” pictures currently in the works of Fritz & Bruno! I’m sooo excited to see these, will of course keep you posted :D. I’m also working on a painting progress video of these guys and hope to have that ready this month some time (I have many vids in the works and am slowly but surely catching up on those, lol) and will upload it to my YouTube channel.

I’m not gonna lie… these two are some of the favourite Pet Portraits I’ve painted to date. Love these little faces! Happy birthday again to Fritz & Bruno’s momma!! I hope you, your puppies, and fam enjoy these paintings for a long long time.

(Photo: Carlos posing next to his mini Pet Portrait painting.)

This little guy is named Carlos. His mom contacted me to do a surprise Pet Portrait painting for his dad, which was given last weekend as a gift for his birthday. They had a candid photo of their pup that they loved from when he was really little (about 6lbs). He’s much bigger now (about 20lbs) which you can see in the above “doppelgänger” photo, but big or small he’s just as cute!

Here is a 50/50 split of the original photo next to the painting:

left: reference photo / right: finished painting

This painting is ‘mini’ – measuring in at 5″x5″. To view a full finished photo of Carlos’ painting, it is viewable in my Pet Portrait portfolio gallery.

(Photo: studio shot of reference photo next to the painting in progress.)

I’m excited to share with you my very first custom PEOPLE PORTRAIT experience!! If you have taken a gander through my portfolio before you probably noticed that there were no portraits of people in there prior to now… and that wasn’t accidental, lol. To be totally honest, the idea of painting people has always been a bit intimidating to me. The level of detail involved, the smooth contours of the skin, creating the flesh tone colours – these are just some of the many aspects that can look very “off” in a hurry (even when they’re just a tiny bit off), and just the thought of all that seemed to push me away. I’ve painted Pet Portraits for years, Minimalist Style kids portraits even, and some Classic Cars on occasion, all of which have their own complexities, but I just still had a mental block about painting people for some reason.

BUT, when I was contacted by a client to paint a portrait of her best friend and his wife for their wedding gift, I just couldn’t resist! She’s actually the one who shot their engagement photos, and she wanted to have her favourite photo painted for them. When she sent me the picture I could totally see why she picked it, it’s truly beautiful. I loved it! At that moment, my reservations about painting people flew out the window (whether that was permanent or just temporary, only time will tell for sure haha!) and I was super excited to work on this project with her!

Here is the finished painting:

“Daydreams of Life & Love” | 11×14 | acrylic on canvas

The reference photo itself was shot in black and white using a film camera, so not only was this my first commission of a portrait of people, it was my first fully black and white toned painting as well. And I gotta say it was lots of fun! I really love the aesthetic of it, and I plan to work on more in this vein in the future for sure.

As for the title of the painting – I’m not sure if you know this about me yet, but I have the hardest time naming my artwork haha. So I invited my client to do the honour for this piece, and she named it “Daydreams of Life & Love”, which I thought was perfectly fitting. This painting headed to Medicine Hat this summer to the newlyweds, and they both actually contacted me after via Facebook to say how happy they were with their gift, which I thought was really sweet of them! Huge thank you goes to my client again for selecting me to be part of such a sentimental gift, and of course for taking the beautiful photo I got to paint from.

Being that this painting is the first of it’s kind in my portfolio, I don’t have a portfolio section for it on my website just yet. But I have given it a home under my Custom Artwork page which features detailed info and pictures on many of my fully custom commission pieces to date. So please feel free to check out detail shots and additional pictures there too if you are interested.

All in all – I may have been intimidated by the thought of painting people before (and understandably I still am a little bit haha) but I’m excited to practice it more often now, and to add new people portrait commissions to my portfolio in the future 🙂 .

Today I dropped off my painting donation for The Alberta Flood Rose Project that I mentioned yesterday.

My sister helped me out of a jam on this piece. I was on a time crunch to finish up some Pet Portraits for a deadline when I heard about the fundraiser, so I wasn’t able to go out and take wild rose pix to paint from in time. My sis often takes pretty photos of nature, so I thought it wouldn’t hurt to ask if she had some wild rose pictures stashed somewhere in her archive. Like me she did not, HOWEVER she was so cool to offer and go take some for me (aw!). So she sent over a pic of the sole rose blossom she was able to find that day (they’re not really in season any more), it was perfect, and I got paintin’!

I like to utilize texture in my paintings, and gave little raised areas on the petal curls and in the flower’s centre. The signature part was much harder to do than I expected though. It measured under an inch on this piece, and let’s just say I was happy when that part was finished haha. Here are some detail shots of my donation piece called ‘Alberta Flood Rose’:

All in all a really cool project to participate in. It’s really neat to see the mix and combination of donation entries in the different compositions, colour schemes, and art mediums, etc. If you’d like to take a peek at the variety of submissions, visit: http://www.thealbertafloodroseproject.com/gallery.html.

(photo: Wild Rose blossoms are few and far between on my walks these days, but I found this little beauty hiding in the grass a couple days ago.)

Very recently I heard about a fundraiser called The Alberta Flood Rose Project, where artists can submit a 4″x4″ art piece featuring imagery of Alberta’s provincial flower (the wild rose) to help raise funds towards the Canadian Red Cross Flood Relief. As soon as I heard about it I zipped out and picked up a 4×4 canvas so I could make it in time before the deadline which is only a few days away. I have submitted a small scale painting, however various fine art media up to 1″ in depth are being accepted also. The submissions will be arranged in groups of 100 together, then framed to create larger art pieces. These larger framed pieces will then be auctioned off to raise funds to aid in the recovery after the recent flooding that devastated parts of Calgary and multiple other cities/communities around the province.

As of right now, the fundraiser has received enough donations to create four finished pieces (so 400 submissions so far and counting!), which is so great to hear! And the miniature wild rose themed pieces are still coming in. If you would like to submit one, there are still a few days left to do so (due by July 26th). There is also talk about creating books with all the entries, and tickets to the fundraiser auction later in August if you are interested as well. For the most up to date information and for further details, your best bet is to check out the fundraiser’s website directly at www.thealbertafloodroseproject.com, or their facebook page.

As often as possible I try to put together “painting progress” style videos of my Pet Portraits, and my most recent video is of Sammy. His portrait was a gift from a group of girlfriends to his mom for her birthday this summer, and they managed to capture the gift opening on film which was so cool! They were so kind to share that moment with me via email, AND for allowing me to share it with you too :). So I’m excited to debut my very first video that incorporates such a clip in addition to the painting details.

Here is Sammy’s flip book style progress video:

(If the video isn’t showing properly here for any reason, you can head on over to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AXQVodbb4OI to view it directly on YouTube)

There have been times that I’ve got to see client’s reactions in person, and it’s always such a joyous and emotional experience! This personal video clip made me feel like I was right there with them, it’s just so neat :). Thank you guys again for sharing this video with me, and for letting me incorporate it into Sammy’s video – such a cool experience to be a part of!

For more of a back story on Sammy’s painting in particular, feel free to check out this blog post on him here too: www.robynmillar.com/sammy/

Word on the street is the video that I shared in my previous blog post didn’t show up for some folks! D’oh!! So there I was, talking away about Instagram’s new video feature & how you can share them in blog posts now etc… and then for some readers there was no video to be found 🙁 which makes no sense. So after finding that out, I’d like to try a mini experiment (and I invite you to join me!) with the hopes of finding a solution. Who’s in???

For this experiment, I’m embedding the same video below as my last post but using YouTube this time (instead of Instagram like before) and hopefully we’ll have more success with it this round! YouTube actually has a couple different ways to put video into blogs, so I’m trying 2 versions. So if you see one, none, or even both videos below – don’t be alarmed :D! But please do feel free to share with me what you see – it’ll be fun… think of it like a fun group science project 😉

And GO!

Experiment pt1:

Experiment pt2:

I invite you to leave a comment below or shoot me an email with what you see above, and which device you are viewing from 🙂 . Go team!

(It just dawned on me that we kind of have the steps of The Scientific Method going on here lol. We’ve stated the Purpose, are doing Research, sort of have a Hypothesis, have a wee Experiment happening, and now working on the Analysis & Conclusions portion. Haha, nice! Who woulda thunk it, lol.)

I’m not totally sure if IG videos are just too new (they’re only about a month or so old) and they’re still hammering out glitches, if there are compatibility issues between different browsers or operating systems, or if there’s just some legit tech-y reason that’s way above my head lol… but at this point I feel it’s wise to try a different way of sharing videos to make sure all readers, in whichever form (via my website, RSS feed, or email subscribers) can see the same thing. Oh technology… I so don’t get you sometimes haha. But I haven’t given up on this video thing yet! I’m too excited!

While we wait for the results, I shall go back to painting!! Thanks so much for your help & talk soon!

Very recently, Instagram (an app that I LOVE to use) introduced video capabilities in addition to their usual photo sharing, which is exciting! I’ve been having a blast with video clips of some of my Animal Doppelgängers to date, and I wanted to share with you my very first IG video:

“Roux”  – a kitty, and his painting with a monocle

link to video: http://instagram.com/p/b15D9DILSn/

(As a side note – I will also be posting most of my IG videos on my YouTube channel too, so even if you’re not on Instagram you can view them in either place for convenience 🙂 )

In a nutshell this new Instagram feature lets you record up to 15 seconds of video (in app) using your phone (or tablet I’m assuming too???), and share it to your Instagram account. You can pause and restart footage as you film so you can get some cool looking edits, or you can shoot strait through if you prefer. It’s possible to add filters to videos too (IG is famous for their photo filters, often giving warmer or older looks to them). A nice feature that they’ve done is they let you pick the still image that people see before they play the video, whereas YouTube for example picks a random spot (and let’s be honest, most times it’s not very flattering lol). Anyway, once you’ve uploaded your video onto your Instagram account you can share it to your Facebook or Twitter or other sites you like, or email it too. You can also embed IG videos right into blog posts which is super cool! So I was excited to share my first Instagram video with you right here in this post.

I definitely love this new video feature. More clips to come soon!

(Photo: Cola posing next to her Pet Portrait painting. I call these “animal doppelganger” shots)

This darling little American Eskimo dog is named Cola. Her mom and I had connected on Instagram/Facebook, and then one day I received an email from Cola’s dad to do Pet Portrait as a surprise anniversary gift (…Take notes fellas!! lol). I thought it was a really sweet gift idea, and I was so excited to work on this painting for them. He sent me an adorable shot of Cola sitting on fresh snow with her head tilted to one side (what’s so cute about doggies doing this? I don’t know but it just is! True fact. lol) and the sweetest subtle smile on her face. As not to paint white against white though, we went with a neutral brown background. I can’t get enough of those pointy little ears, that tiny nose – just so cute all around. She was so fun to paint, and here is the finished piece:

‘Cola’ | 9″x12″ | acrylic on canvas

And on a different note (but still Cola related), I just had to share this awesome pic of her taken by Amber of Just for Kix Photography! Funnily enough she did a photo shoot with Cola around the same time I was finishing up my Pet Portrait painting of her. Although we follow each others work regularly, neither of us were aware of the other’s project until we were both finished, so it was super funny how the timing worked out! Anyway, here is one of my favourite shots she took of Cola:

Photo courtesty of Just for Kix Photography.

To view the full photo album by Amber, please visit Just for Kix Photography’s facebook Page. If you are on Instagram and would like to follow pictures of Cola, check out @michhu. I’m also working on a progress video of Cola’s painting, and hope to post that soon as well, so stay tuned 🙂

Happy anniversary again to Cola’s mom & dad!