Choosing Colours for a King Charles Spaniel

One of our members Bob sent in his picture for some advice on choosing colours. Listen to the advice below or read the transcription:
Hi Bob I'm looking at your picture of the King Charles and it's very very pretty picture but I got a feeling that the colours that I'm going to give you here although they're accurate to the photographs they may be the photographs has gone a bit dark. I may be wrong. But you would only know that. But I would say that when you're starting out on the dark fur and I imagine it's the the dark fur that you're referring to because really the white I've covered so many times before. In this case I would start off with a light grey in the lighter areas and a dark grey (and when I say dark grey a mid grey should I say) something like 273 or 233 for the dark areas now the reason I do that is because if you put the colour directly on that is the 187 which can I'm going to come up to next. It will be too rich and you are going to have a lot of trouble getting that too toned down. But with the grey it would be a good buffer.A couple of little areas where you've got a very light area in that fur, I'm looking at the ear now particularly it might be an idea even to put a bit of ivory on there. So now we're looking at three different base colours the mid grey for the darker areas like the 270 something like that for the lighter areas. For the very light areas there I'd use ivory. So you've got three colours there as your base. Now I'm assuming that you're using the ingres paper that we have. If you are using in a different colour paper this could alter. Probably if it's PastelMat then it could still work the same way because you've got to put a ground colour on to start with anyway and build up that then you'd use of 187. I would go to 187 and that you'll find when you put it on, it's much too rich so you'll have to immediately follow that with 283 and even you might even have to put a 176 or something like that on top of it. When you put the 187 on there it would become too fierce. The grey would have weakened it to a certain extent but you're still going to have to go on top of it. Unfortunately we haven't got a colour that exactly matches that. So you're always going to have to look at a compromise. There's no question about that.The eyes, they would be similar sort of tones in fact, although they're a lot darker and you can't see the eyes very well in this animal so you're going to have to do a lot of guesswork. What I do when a situation like this occurs is I go through the Internet and find similar coloured animals with better eyes. That gives you a better idea of how the eyes should look. But in any case you've still got to darken them to the level that they've got them at the moment you can't have a light eye and a dark fur it wouldn't work. But at least you would have an understanding of the original colour of the eye and you can put the base colours on accordingly even though you may have to darken them to the same extent as it's dark in the photograph. Good luck with that. It's not the best photograph in the world I must admit. So you can have some fun with that. But I wish you well. To get advice from Colin on your artwork, become a member of the website and join any one of our packages. Click here to learn more.