We have had a busy day today!

This morning we visited our village school, which is sadly no longer a school,  however its being used by the village for all sorts of events and classes. We have been asked to be involved in an event in June where we will be showing our work and doing a little demonstration with the kids. It will be fun! We just happened to pop by when they had just had a meeting with the Bishop as there is a possibility the school will be sold and we won’t have access any longer which will be a devastation for our village and the community. We were unaware of the meeting but arrived at the end, just in time for tea and home made Welsh cakes!  We also met a few of the older residence of the village who remember the village when it was thriving when there was 4 shops, a post office and a school. The only thing that is still open these days is the pub. The village spirit still shines through however and it was lovely to catch up and meet some of the residents. We live just outside the village, however our house is one of the the oldest houses along with the pub and so its well known!

We will get to see everyone again tomorrow as we are going to a choir at our local church. The choir is from South Wales and they will be singing show tunes! We are really looking forward to it!

Then the telephone company has been doing work at the bottom of our road putting in a new telephone line all day and so we haven’t had broadband for most of the afternoon. How dull is it without access to the internet! While working I listen to Spotify – if you haven’t tried to go and download it (spotify.com) as you can listen to pretty much any song at high quality for free.  It also suggests song you might like. The best thing about it is that its legal and free!

So while we haven’t had broadband I have been playing around with my website for a couple of hours, mainly giving the tutoring section an overhaul. Its been something that I have wanted to update for ages, especially with Nick now tutoring his own portraiture course. I have re-written the course pages, the home page, and changed a few things in the navigation.

This evening I will be back at my easel painting the grass, I have only a couple of hours painting time left on it and I will scan and blog the final stage tomorrow!

This is nearing the final stage of Winstons and Daisys portyrtait, I am going to be working on the background next : )

This is the next stage of the spaniels pet portrait, and im going to be working on the details in the faces, pulling everything together and also concentrating on the background next too.

This is the next stage in the cat montage pet portrait in pastel. I am working on the final cat today and I will be going over the background with a light mottled shade and then complete the final detail on all of the cats.

This is the next stage in the spaneil pet portrait painting. Asd you can see i ahve been working on the left hand spaniel, although the photo hasnt come out very clear as my light over my easel is really shining on it today. The oils are quite glossy so they pick up the light. I will be moving onto the black spaneil today and then going back to the other one to add the final details.

Had a really love day on Sunday, Dads birthday so we had them over for the day and I cooked beef casserole and treacle tart. It all went down really well. The beef was lovely, we get it from our local butcher who has a large farm near by so we know where it comes from which is important in this day and age. It also taste way better than the meat from supermarkets!

Back to painting!

This is the next stage of the portrait of the 5 cats in pastel. The darker areas at the top are just shadows from my easel, these wont be in the final portrait. I will be adding some tonal ranges into the background which is why im going to create the final details of each image at the end. I will be moving onto the left had cat today and will blog it so you can see the next stage.

This blog post is primarily for my clients. The terms and conditions  and the terms form have been updated.

http://www.pet-portraitartist.com/terms.htm

Good Morning!

This is the next stage to the spaniel portrait. It is a 16 x 12 oil painting on canvas and I’m one stage further than this, as I’m currently working on the left hand ear of the brown spaniel. I worked on it all day yesterday and its amazing how time consuming spaniels ears can be with all those wonderful curls! I will be working on the right ear of the brown spaniel today and I will blog a new photo of them soon.

The weather has broken here in Wales and its all overcast and cloudy and the forecast for the weekend is heavy rain so I am so pleased we took some time out last weekend in the garden.  You have to get outside when you can living here in Wales, we are renowned for our rain. At least it makes the garden grow and if its raining my bank balance fares better as I spend less on plants in our local garden centre : ) Its a wonderful place to visit as its family run which makes it friendly and personal. There are acres of polytunnels and plants and trees to look at and they also have a lovely garden which is mature with ponds and little paths with lots of overhanging trees which is free to wander around. Its definitely inspiration for an artist!

Back to the spaniels now and Iwill blog the next stage soon!

Heeloo!

Here are a couple of stages of the spaniels pet portrait I have been working on. This portrait was a gift voucher purchased a few years ago and we have only got together just before Christmas to work out what the client would like. This is my last portrait that was ordered/organised at Christmas and so my next ones are orders from 2009. It feels much better, as though im catching up a little..at least im now in the right year! Will post more tomorrow!

Hi all,

We had local clients visit the studio yesterday for us to take photos of their dog called Holly who is a 12 year old Poodle x Yorkie. She is a gorgeous dog and very well behaved! It turned out that the clients had been meaning to commission us for a portrait for the last 10 years as a few of their friends had already commissioned back then with their collies. They had been given my details all that time ago and arrived with one of my old brochures in hand!

It was from 1999 and was such a blast from the past to see. Before the Internet was common place in everyone’s homes the only way to get pet portrait commissions was to advertise in dog magazines and with posters and flyers locally and then give brochures to show my work to those who were interested. Of course for anyone starting up these days it must be a lot easier with the internet at hand and all the information it has to offer! It was so much more difficult back then, no help, guidance or advice from the internet, no other artists to discuss things with, we had to make our own way…and advertising in magazines was very, very costly!

I use to print hundreds of brochures each year, as soon as an enquiry came though id start my little Epson printer going on my MMX2 3gb hard drive computer and it would take a good hour to print from start to finish as it was so slow! : ) At one point I printed the pages double sided and would get completely confused, printing them upside down! We eventually got a business printer which was faster. I then bound them with a binding machine, placed them in A4 letter sized envelops and posted them off first class royal mail! How antiquated does that sound these days. I can remember hand writing letters to clients and having to wait ages for a reply!

Looking at the brochure, which I have to say was quite well designed for 10 years ago though my self taught graphic design skills have improved somewhat since then.It even had a link to our very first website where we not only offered my pet portraits and Nicks people portraits (Nick was also illustrating books at that time for an agent) but it also offered tutoring with the Learn To draw CD Rom that Nick designed. Nick did all the artwork and text for it and compiled it using special cdrom authoring software. We also offered tutoring from our studio, Nick taught watercolour classes and computer classes mainly to retired people and I ran children’s arts and crafts classes which I loved!

Looking back we have done a lot of art related things within our business, probably too many to mention here, and we have had a real reflection day thinking about them all – the things that worked and the things that didn’t. We learnt from everything we did, I don’t think we would be where we are today without all of those experiences. When we started in business in 1994 it was very slow starting but perseverance, we found, is key!

The weather has been wonderful these last few days and we worked in the garden a lot at the weekend. We took this photo of Amram who was waiting for us to finally come in to give him his tea : )