Best Ball Ever

A bright, playful drawing of that most important of canine possessions: the ball.

I created Best Ball Ever while experimenting with a limited palette, using the colours dogs see best as my starting point. It became the first piece in my Art for Dogs series — art designed with a canine audience in mind.

Nerd notes

Humans have three types of colour-detecting cone cells in our eyes. Dogs have two, giving them a colour range dominated by blues and yellows.

That means a bright red ball on green grass may be much less visually dramatic to a dog than it is to us — the two colours can appear relatively similar. Blue or yellow gives a ball a much better chance of standing out.

Which raises the possibility that humans have been buying dogs the wrong-coloured balls for years.

Details

Handmade, one-of-a-kind artwork

Unframed

A4 — 21 × 29.7 cm (8.3 × 11.7 in)

Watercolour and colour pencil on mixed media paper