In March of 2018 and 2019 I challenged myself to illustrate 31 dogs in 31 days. In 2018 I had stumbled upon a Twitter account called We Rate Dogs (@dog_rates), run by Matt Nelson. People send him photos of their dogs and he rates them out of 10 and adds a humorous caption. Due to inflation, many dogs now get ratings higher than 10/10. I think it's up to 14/10. But as Matt says, "They're all good dogs." I decided to use the dogs he posted during the month of March as the starting point for my self-imposed challenge, hence the title March of Dogs.
Normally I take great care in choosing photos (most of which I take myself) to draw from. In this case I had to draw the dog I'd been dealt, and by times it was a difficult task. Sometimes I chose to veer quite far from the original photo, inventing a context in which to place the dog, as is the case with Scooter, Rooster, and Duke (2018) and Lilo & Boggins, Cookie, and Nacho, (2019).
My drawings from 2019 were auctioned to raise funds for ElderDog Canada, a wonderful rescue group that helps both elder dogs and elder people.
Each year I've produced a lovely little book of the 31 sketches. Go to the books menu if you'd like to purchase either 2018, 2019, or both.
You can follow my Twitter postings and click through to see the original photos by going to my feed, @KristaWells1 or simply search #MarchOfDogs on Twitter and choose "latest". If you're more of an Instagram fan, my handle there is @kristawells.
