Purple Pony Art Blog

Still working away on pet portraits over here, including sharing them! Astrid is an over the rainbow bridge soft-furred rat who enjoyed chilling in her coconut. After chatting with Astrid's human, I decided a three-dimensional paper picture was the right choice.

I first drew Beckham as a puppy years ago and it was delightful that his person came back to give me an update and order a new portrait!




Marker and pencil crayon ::: 2023

I'm still fulfilling orders from the comic expo, so I'm behind on most of my socials. You can stay tuned on my Facebook page or Instagram though!


Hi friends, I'm behind on all my socials because I'm trying to complete a pet portrait a day. I hope you're all doing well. I have 16 orders left to go, whew!

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A post shared by Christine 🦄 🐦🌈🍁 (calzephyr77)

So, back in September I was fortunate enough to attend a local Parrot Palooza as a vendor. It was a wild time and I even met local celebirdies, such as Max the Moluccan.

Originally the show was supposed to be in a community hall, but they switched it to the new VCA vet hospital down the road from us. Somehow I didn't factor in that I would be in a room of screaming parrots for seven hours. It was like "SCREAM SCREAM SCREAM SIREN SCREAM I love you SCREAM SCREAM SCREAM BARK BARK hello", but once people arrived, talking balanced out the noise. All the parrots there were club member parrots--no outside birds allowed. There were so many! Cockatiels, conures of all kinds, cockatoos, one blue and gold macaw, an African grey, a few caiques, several different types of Amazons, a parrotlet, two Quakers, and a grey parrot who someone told me the name of, but that I didn't recognize. I'm so happy with how the portraits of Birdzilla and Yoshi turned out.

I'll admit I'm not the speediest artist, but I began this trio of dog portraits in 2019! It was hard to find a good chunk of time to finish them while I was finishing up school. Naturally there was a lot of things to do and I was only able to sit down and finish the final portrait this month.

Each portrait is 4x6" and was rendered in pencil crayon, marker, and PanPastel. Click through to see the larger version on Flickr.

One of the reasons I wanted to do an art trade with my friend was that I'm so lousy at digital art. I haven't touched Clip Studio Paint since an earlier post with a budgie. I'm old enough where I should have mad skills, but I don't. Putting together a digital drawing isn't very intuitive to me and I struggle with making it "look right" compared to traditional artwork. Practice makes perfect right? I started the drawing in Clip Studio Paint, but just wasn't feeling "it". The problem turned out to be that while I had some great reference photos of Peaches, I just didn't have a sketch to make me excited about it. That turned out to be pretty important because my digital painting skills suck so much. Having that vision of the end picture really helps :-D

I decided to go with a fruit label type design that will have peaches and Peaches. Click for much larger.

I finished up Frank's portrait recently. He was the last commission from the comic show and I'm quite happy with how he turned out. Frank has a lion cut, so it made it difficult to feel comfortable with the body proportions. A little bit of white paint for eyes and whiskers and it felt good to be done :-)






4x6" ::: Pencil crayon and marker ::: 2019

I have sequestered myself away to do a lot of drawing. I have a table booked at the Red & White Comic & Toy Show on September 8 and I needed to get real good, real fast! It's a one day show and I won't have the luxury of finishing work after the fact.

One of the sketches turned into this dog. Dogs are a challenge for me as they often turn out to look like little horses :-)





4x6" ::: Pencil crayon and marker ::: 2019

A huge thank you to everyone who allowed me to take the extra time on their pet portraits. It was a real pleasure for me as the artist. This pup is Marvel superfan Beckham! Stay tuned for more.





4x6" ::: Pencil ::: 2019