Veteran artist Pat Reynolds provides a few pointers and demonstrates how to paint a pet portrait.

There you are, airbrush in hand, ready to produce a marketable product, pull a profit, feel good about what you produce, and all without getting a migraine! I'm here to say that it can be done. In fact, there are ways to produce customer airbrush artwork that enable you to put your worries to rest and work with more confidence.

In my 23 years in the airbrush business, I've learned several important points that I'd like to share with you.

First, you have to decide why you are airbrushing in the first place. For instance, if your painting is a hobby, you may approach a project in a totally different manner than someone who does it for a living. A hobbyist has no problem with spending several days on a T-shirt; the time spent is simply a labour of love.

Those of us who paint as a profession, however, must look at it from a completely different perspective. In order to make money painting a custom design, you have to decide how much money per hour you are worth.

Customarily, about one dollar per minute is the going rate (without argument), but the market can bear more or less, depending on your location. With that said, we now understand that time is money. So, we have to find a way to take the order and do the best job possible without having to "redo" or "touch up" any part of the completed design. I use the element of size to my advantage - customers are simply amazed that I went to the trouble of making it to such a full shirt design. Next, I use color to my advantage, purposely adding purple where there are shadows and orange where light is hitting the subject. The customer assumes that this is a painting style and disregards any minor color differences. Most people don't expect a museum piece on their shirt, but they do expect to be impressed. Remember, art is more a presentation than a representation.

	Step 1 First, using a projector, I sketch the dog with a pencil. Sometimes I simply sketch with an airbrush, using white and yellow, but the projector was perfect for this article.
	Step 2 I use Createx white to block out all the areas where light would hit the subject. This makes it easier to resharpen those edges where color meets white. It also gives the piece an overall glow.
	Step 3 As a rule of thumb, I always use cool colors for shadows and warm colors for lit areas. On this step, I mix a cool gray, using three parts white, one part black, and two parts Createx Caribbean blue (lighten if necessary). If the paint you are using seems too thick, don't be afraid to cut it down with a few drops of water at a time. The technique I've used here is simple tiny dagger strokes - not so tiny that it's blinding, just small enough to "represent" fur. Not that all of the fur has direction, and it seems to flow. This is very important because it gives it more of a soft look.
	Step 4 Next I grab my Caribbean blue, and lightly spray and "block in" all of the shadows. This will almost give the picture the feel of a blue secondary light source, which works when you want to stay away from the actual color.
	Step 5 The next color applied is a mixture of golden yellow, orange, and light brown. The object is to spray the color on lightly and layer it to get even coverage and maintain neat edges. I hold the airbrush at angles facing away from areas that need to remain clean - note the distance from the surface.
	Step 6 This is the easy part! I simply spray orange lightly over the brown areas to give it a richer look. Be careful, because too much orange here is hard to correct.

Step 7
Next, I pull out the black - this is the part that gets me excited! The details seem to start appearing out of nowhere, because the sheer contrast of the darks and lights. A huge amount of emphasis is placed on the eyes here. One thing to point out is the dagger strokes are all done softly, so they don't overpower the eyes themselves. The pupil must be placed so that, when you back up from the artwork, he doesn't look cross-eyed. (This is very common mistake in all portrait painting - when you see the portrait close up, it appears to be correct.)

On the dog's head, I want to show a little fur detail, but not too much, so I angle the airbrush upward and bring dagger strokes into the brown. The nose is not much of a challenge - I lightly layer the black, shaping the nostrils as I go, but not making any hard lines.

Step 8
Now for the white (I love using white on the final details). Here I attack the eye with very sharp small dagger strokes to illustrate light reflections - just a couple usually does the trick (Remember, you can start working a piece to death in a hurry, so know when to say "That's enough!"). Next, I move on to the nose. This is just a series of tiny dot patterns to show the skin texture. Then, throughout the entire painting, I fill in white daggers in any areas I see that are missing attention.

Step 9
I do a quick rehashing of some bluegrey on the snout area to make sure that, from a distance, it looks like really soft fur. Again, this is done by using soft daggers, all in the same direction.