Carter Coat of Arms

I have been working on a different kind of digital art lately. I have been interested in genealogy for many years and am descended from an English family that had a coat of arms. My husband also is from an armigerous English family. Believe it or not our families lived about four miles apart in the 17th century. So I have been updating my rendition of the coats of arms. This one was used by the Carters of Kempston, Bedfordshire, England. The earliest immigrant of the family was Capt. Thomas Carter who arrived in VA in the 1690's.

This painting wasn't all brush work.  It took some drawing, some painting and a lot of playing with gradients in Illustrator.  The dogs were done with digital brushes in Photoshop and then moved into place in Illustrator.