Marutaro, Instagram's famous dog

 

The family are fans of Marutaro, the loveable shiba inu who has two and a half million followers of his feed on Instagram. This perpetually-smiling pooch lives in Tokyo with his owner Shinjiro Ono and is also the star of a Tokyo suburb "museum" of all things Maru; it's where you can buy all manner of souvenirs, from tee-shirts to posters and fridge magnets.

A challenge was tossed to me: Draw Maru from one of his photographs. This work took, I guess, five to six hours, spread over a few sessions ... time stolen from here and there through the week.

I sketched the dog lightly in pencil, and thereafter, it was a huge exercise in really seeing what was before me - thinking in terms of abstract colors - rather than drawing from any preconceived notions of what a dog should look like.

The big challenge was that I was drawing on white Canson paper, and Maru, a tan-colored dog, does have a lot of white in his fur. Pinterest was a big help. I learned from posts on color pencil art that even white-furred dogs/cats do have a lot of "color" in their fur, sometimes reflected off their surroundings. With Maru's white parts, I used Prismacolor's range of warm greys and French greys, and also some sage green, a greyish-green, believe it or not.

Even the brown parts took more than a few shades of brown to achieve depth and a fluffy look. The finished work is an improvement on my drawing of Tasha (see post here), but is still not quite there, not as realistic as some of the photo-realistic drawings of animals one sees on Pinterest. But it'll do for now; I still consider myself a beginner!

Another tool I used for this drawing was a white gel pen, a Mitsubishi Signo Uniball, which was indispensable in rendering the bright white parts - the bits of his black lip and tongue, which are wet with saliva and reflect as bright white, and his fine white whiskers. Being able to dot his pupils with the white also made the eyes come more alive!