Toy dogs: Prints of the Small Breeds

Small dogs are harder to draw with dignity than large ones. The temptation is to make them cute, and cute wears badly on a wall. What works is treating a nine-pound dog exactly as you would treat a mastiff: as an animal with a particular structure, coat and expression, drawn at full attention rather than arranged on a cushion.

Mike Sibley takes that approach and it is why his small breeds hold up. He works in graphite and often spends more than two hundred hours on a drawing, and in a heavily coated toy breed that time shows as individual hairs rather than a general fluffiness. Pamela Ryan is the other name here, including her Miniature White Poodle, and her handling of a white coat against a pale ground is worth looking at on its own account.

This is the section people most often buy from as a present, and it is also the section where the recipient is most likely to own the actual dog. That cuts both ways: a good drawing of the right breed lands very well, and a generic one is spotted immediately. It is worth checking the coat type and colour against the dog you have in mind before ordering.

Everything here is a giclee print on archival paper with fade-resistant inks, so nothing yellows over a decade on a wall. Most are nineteen pounds ninety-nine. Sizes sit around 41 x 28 cm before mounting, which fits a standard off-the-shelf frame without a trip to a framer.

Every print has stayed in its wrapping since the day it was bought, has never been hung or displayed, and comes to you clean and unmarked.