Gordon Setters: The Gordon Setter by Mike Sibley

The Gordon is the heaviest of the setters and the only one from Scotland - black and tan, built more solidly than the Irish, and considerably less often drawn. If you own one you will already know how little decent art of the breed exists. Most people reach for the Irish Setter because it is the showier dog, which leaves Gordon owners with very little to choose from.

In a pencil drawing the black and tan is the problem. There is no colour to carry the markings, so the whole distinction between the black coat and the tan points has to be made in tone alone, and it has to be made without lifting the black areas to a flat grey. That is the thing owners of black dogs always complain photographs get wrong, and it is where the hours go in a drawing like this.

Sibley works in graphite, has been a professional artist for over twenty years, and often spends more than two hundred hours on a single drawing. On a heavily feathered breed that time shows in the coat - the chest, the back of the legs, the underside of the tail - as actual hair rather than as shading.

The Irish Setter, also by Sibley, has its own page, and both sit in the wider Setters section if you want to see them together.

This is a giclee print on archival paper with fade-resistant inks, so nothing yellows over the years. It is nineteen pounds ninety-nine, sized around 41 x 28 cm before mounting to fit a standard off-the-shelf frame. The print has stayed in its wrapping since the day it was bought and has never been hung or displayed.