Great Dane Print by Mike Sibley

Scale is the whole problem with drawing a Great Dane. On a sheet of paper every dog is the same size, so the thing that defines the breed in life - the sheer height of it, the fact that it can rest its chin on a kitchen table without stretching - has to be conveyed some other way. It is done through proportion: the length of leg relative to body, the depth of chest, the way the head sits on a long neck. Get those right and the animal reads as enormous even at 28 centimetres across.

The coat gives an artist nothing. It is short, tight and almost featureless, so the dog is described entirely by the light falling across muscle and bone. There is no fur texture to fall back on, which is why so many drawings of smooth-coated giants end up looking like sculpture rather than animal.

What Sibley brings to it is the expression. Great Danes have a mild, slightly mournful look that sits oddly on a dog that size, and the contrast between the scale and the gentleness is the reason people keep them. A drawing that gets the body right and the face wrong misses the point of the breed entirely.

He has been a professional artist for over twenty years, works in graphite, and often spends more than two hundred hours on a single drawing.

This is a giclee print on archival paper with fade-resistant inks, so nothing yellows over a decade on a wall. 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.