Do you love painting? Or would you like to try it for the first time? Let’s paint a dachshund together, step by step — a small breed of dog that adults and children adore.
I had a small 30×40 canvas at hand.
In this article I want to show you how I painted it with acrylics, which are thinned with water and dry quickly.
Which paints we’ll need to paint a dachshund in acrylics:
- black
- brown
- blue
- violet
- red + yellow, or orange
My canvas is fine-grained and stretched on a wooden frame. Before painting, I covered it with a transparent layer of ochre, so it isn’t white — its colour is closer to yellow.
Large and small brushes (whatever you have)
Video: “How to paint a dachshund step by step”
Where do you start when painting a dachshund?
With the drawing, of course 🙂 Once you’ve sketched it in, you can move on to the underpainting. At this first stage we cover the drawing with the main colours. More specifically, I made the background light blue and the dachshund black, and painted its muzzle and eyebrows in a ginger tone. I used brown on the inside of the ears and on the eyes.
Step two in painting the dachshund
Remember? Acrylic dries fast and doesn’t keep you waiting. That means you can move on to the second stage right after the underpainting. Here our job is to enrich the dachshund’s body and muzzle with different shades (grey, bluish grey, brown). Painting the dachshund becomes really exciting once we start building volume with these colours. If we used the biggest brush at the first stage, now we can switch to medium-sized brushes.
The dachshund in acrylic paints: working up the details.
As you can guess, this is already our third stage. We need to work up our long-nosed dog in more detail 😉
We mix lighter colours that will go on top of the previous layer.
The ginger tones on the muzzle need to become richer, so we use red and yellow, and we can add some brown to the mix too. The nose should also get its proper colour, with the lightest fur tone around it.
Black fur can’t be simply black — it holds countless shades. We “decorate” it with light blue, light grey, ochre and brown.
At this stage you can also paint the dachshund’s brown eyes and the highlights in them.
Adding detail to the dachshund painting
At this final stage we need to add detail to the main character of our painting. First of all, I made the background more colourful — a flat single colour seemed boring to me.
For this stage we need the smallest brushes, which we use to create the effect of short fur, the fine whiskers and even that cute wet nose. Everything should be worked up, and every detail should be in the picture.
As you can see, the dachshund painting came together quickly thanks to its small size and the fast drying time of acrylics. The painting turned out bright and beautiful, thanks to the dachshund’s eyes looking so attentively at the viewer.
For a more detailed walkthrough, watch the video at the top of the page.
