Dog Portraits

These are two dog portraits that were commissioned for Christmas presents. I used charcoal and conte'. I still have yet to get the art of charcoal down perfectly. I currently use pencil to do the basic outline and shape, and then go over that with the charcoal. The problem is that if I go too heavy on the pencil it shows through the charcoal, and if I go too light I'm prone to make more mistakes... The scary thing about this medium is that if you screw up it is super hard to erase the line completely. I was a little worried while starting these because they are my first animal portraits and I had no idea how they would turn out. All went well though and I'm happy with the final product!