A dog poses next to its watercolor portrait by Morgan.

If someone is walking with their dog in Astoria and happens to encounter Deborah Morgan, there’s a good chance she’ll ask if she can paint the dog.

Morgan looks to capture the detail and personality of local pets in portraits that she paints using watercolors. She’s painted labs, bulldogs and poodles among other breeds, and has painted plenty of cats, too.

Pet portraits are a somewhat new style for Morgan, who’s been making art on and off for decades. Her first pet portrait was of her 6-year-old chocolate lab, Statler.

“I did eight or 10 practices with it because I couldn’t get the color right,” she said.

“When I finally got it right, I shared it with a friend of mine,” Morgan recalled. “She said, ‘Oh, I’d like that for myself,’ because she has a chocolate lab.” So she started another painting.

Afterward, a family friend, who walks dogs, sent Morgan photos of the canines he works with. He gave her about seven to 10 pictures of the dogs — and she got to work on a portrait of each. From there, requests started to pour in.

“Now, anybody she knows, family or friends in any state or any place, send her pictures and she paints their animal,” Ed Morgan, Deborah’s son, said.

So far, Deborah doesn’t charge for her pieces and looks at painting as a hobby and a way to improve her skills. “Anytime I see a dog, I ask (the owner) to send me a photo of it,” she said.

Deborah estimated that she’s painted nearly 100 pet portraits within the past few years.

She starts with printing out photos and tracing the outline, then shades the colors, defining the animal’s nose and eye shapes. From there, she works slowly on her pieces, getting basic colors down first and continuing to build on the outline.

Sometimes, Deborah will spend weeks working on a single portrait. She’s an avid dog lover herself, Ed said, and she often can’t walk past a dog without saying hi.

Years ago, she took several art classes while living on the East Coast, including ones that taught her to use acrylic and watercolor paints. “I didn’t do watercolor again, because watercolor was tough for me,” she said.

Watercolors are what she described as a “loose” medium, and she found herself gravitating toward acrylic painting.

She started making small, 2-by-5-inch acrylic paintings of landscapes and scenes, which she has given extensively as gifts. But over the last few years, her main focus has transitioned to pet portraits, and back to using watercolor paints.

“It’s a process I enjoy more than a scenery,” Deborah said of doing pet portraits.

It’s taken decades to hone her craft, but during the coronavirus pandemic, Deborah had the chance to dive into painting. Achieving so much detail in pets’ faces using watercolors is difficult, but she likes the challenge.

Deborah plans to keep creating pet portraits for the foreseeable future. She’s considered going back to acrylics, but it’s hard when she keeps running into four-legged friends she wants to paint, Deborah said.

Morgan’s painted greeting cards are available at the Riverdog in Astoria.