I thought we would have a bit of an update with the blog, so if you have noticed it looks a bit different I have been spending a bit of time playing around the with design. I have also tweaked the top header and popped it on the cat, dog and horse sites too. The main site is still in progress!

We went to a lovely wedding in Cardiff this weekend as my friend got married, it was a beautiful sunny day and Tom was very well behaved in the car as it was quite a journey, so we were very pleased. Took my camera took loads of photos, but because I was behind the camera, there was none of me! Typical! So hopefully we will get a few from the professional photographer.

Finally out of the three individual sites, the Horse Portrait Website for Nick is complete  – www.horse-portraitartist.com

This site is dedicated to Nicks equine portraits. He has written a new ‘about me’ page and I have tweaked the site to fall into place with the new design the same as the cat portrait site and the dog portrait site. I have also added a few of Nicks new pieces of  artwork in the gallery and again condensed it to one gallery page so its easier to view. I have made a new testimonials page, a new framing page and a commissions page all similar to the other sites but with new text throughout.

I’m pretty pleased with the way the three sites are now, I still have things I need to add but there are always jobs to do on a website! Websites are never complete, they should always be evolving and if you have put a site online and think “great ok lets sit back and let the orders flow in…..”  you need to think again!

I have now completed the updates for our dog portraits website -  dog-portraitartist.com

There have been quite a few changes to this site, similar to the cat portraits site which I have just overhauled. It use to be entirely devoted to Nicks pastels but we have opened it up now to both of our works so our clients have a choice between pastels, pencil and oils for each individual subject.

If you take a look around you will see everything is very similar to the cat site in design so there is a flow between the sites and clients will know where they are at all times. I have created a single gallery depicting some of our best dog portraits in a variety of mediums, a testimonials page, framing page, commissions page etc I have rewritten most of the site too so that the text is different from the cat site and our main pet portraits site. This is important as its imperative that text isn’t duplicated anywhere else on the web.

I find it helpful to rewrite things every now and again as up and coming pet portrait artists do tend to use our text as the basis of their sites to get a leg up. I have again recently come across another site where I can recognise my style of writing on their pages and their graphics are pretty similar to ours too. Everything published on the Internet is up for grabs so it’s important to keep things fresh every now and again. I think it’s important to get inspiration from other sites, there’s no doubt about that, but a little personal creativity can go along way and can make or break whether someone commissions you.

I have been working on our cat website this week, Nick and I have done some lovely portraits of cats recently, particularly Nick with his pastel portraits, that aren’t on our main site and I felt it was about time the gallery was updated. I have taken some time to update the overall design to reflect our main site and I also updated the top banner which I hope to carry on through the rest of the sites eventually. The dog and horse sites need updating next to bring them inline with the new navigation and width of the site. Also the galleries need updating too! Its going to be a lot of work, web design is very time consuming but I’ll get there! One down as it were! Have a look and if you see any mistakes or you have any ideas for improvement I’d love to hear from you.

http://www.cat-portraitartist.com

As  some of  my readers will know I run a Pet Portrait Diploma Course in association with the London Art College. I wrote,  illustrated and tutor the course which is very popular for budding artists who want to brush up on their drawing skills and learn to paint and draw animals.  It has been running for a fair few years now and I have been taking the time over the lst couple fo months to create a new revised 2010 edition for new students who enrol.

I have taken this opportunity to add some of Nicks step by step pastel portraits into the course and some close up examples of his work on velour, as this medium seem to be very popular with budding artists. One of my favourite professional  artists has also allowed me to use her work as examples in the acrylic section, and for close ups in the how to paint eyes, noses, fur etc and that is Nicky Jones www.faithfulfriendsportraits.co.uk the detail in her work is mesmerising and I feel honoured to be allowed to use a few of her pieces for my students to view and learn from.

If you would like to find out more about the Diploma please visit the London Art College website or my own page about the course here – Pet Portrait Diploma.

We have been approached by a lovely chap who runs a horse sale website and has listed 10 of Nicks best oil and pastel equine paintings on his website for his clients and visitors to view. I have done a screen capture of the page, there’s more info and pictures on the page itself and if you would like to visit click on this link – Nicks Horse Listing

We got chatting to the guy who runs the website and you can read more about him and his website along with a photo of one of his beautiful horses below…..

Doug Stewart from wowhorses.com owns Appaloosa and Paint horses and the picture below is of Top Quest Zeuss, their Appaloosa Stallion which was twice national champion in Canada at the European Championships where he came 2nd in Halter, at age 15 against 3-4 years old; not bad for an old man!

Dougs website was started last year and has put a lot of work into it. There are 3 sections to the site which are horse services including equine artists, horses for sale and rescue horses which is in progress. The main thrust of the website will be ‘horses for sale‘, however Doug expects a lot of the visitors will also be interested in horse art and other items. Doug intends to set up relationships with rescue organisations, offering a free service to make a contribution to support horse rescues. Doug also has written lots of articles, in particular horse care which contains a phenomenal amount of wonderful, interesting and useful information for any horse enthusiast and keeper. We hope that you enjoy his website and also viewing Nicks webpage!

Every year that passes we try to streamline our business and our day to day working schedule so that we can put our efforts and time in the right areas to help improve our artwork, our customer service, our tutoring and our shop front – the websites. Both Nick and I sit down periodically throughout the year to discuss how things are going, what we feel we can improve on, what we think is working for us and what isn’t. We usually have a chat at the start of the year, and plan how things are going to progress over the coming months and one thing we are always trying to improve on is time management. We want to be able to give as much time as we can to clients, regarding the usual things like emails, composites, painting, drawings plus the work in progress on the blog. Above all the most important part of our business is painting and having enough time in the day to complete the painting work we have to do, whilst still keeping a high level of customer support through communication and keeping our students happy, so streamlining is important. With this in mind we have decided upon a few changes this year to help things run smoothly and hopefully for the better for our clients.

The first is to amalgamate our blogs into one, so that all of our clients can view their portraits in the one place. You may have already noticed some changes here as I have updated things over the last few days.  This will mean a lot less work and far better for the customer as they can stay in one place to see what’s happening in the studio. It will be more populated and exciting as we will both be contributing to it.

We have also closed one of our websites so that we have 4 now in total which will be a lot easier for me to keep on top of. Web-design is very time consuming and the time of updating and maintaining them all takes away from our time of painting and other important areas of our business. So we will have 4 websites, our main Pet Portraits site, and the dedicated sites for Dog, Cats and Horses. You will see that you can get to all of our sites via the top banner on all pages of all of the website and they are now interlinked. You can always get back to our main site by clicking the top left corner of the sites on the studio entrance sign. Our main site depicts our cottage and business name Red Kite Studios (which we have had for the last 16 years) Many of you might not know we have a bird of prey here called the Red Kite and invariably you can see them around and about here, many years ago they were few and far between. Our area is known for being ‘Red Kite Country’.

I have made a few other tweaks here and there on the websites and have also updated some of the galleries so you could say we are pretty much fully back work now. Nick has completed one portrait however sadly it was for a local client and we are both snowed in so they were unable to collect it for the birthday today. I will blog it tomorrow.  I will also be posting the startings of some of our portraits soon too. We are waiting on a few canvases and due to being snowed in we haven’t had any deliveries, post (or milk!) for over a week, however everything will be completed for their deadlines, so never fear!

Melanie and Nick

What a wonderful start to 2010 – a magical blanket of snow! It started to snow last night and continued quite a bit through the night, and we have just over 5 inches. We usually get a flourish of snow around once a year and so its a great treat to us, especially since we dont have to travel anywhere to work. We crank up the woodburner bring plenty of logs in and enjoy it. We took some photos early this morning, these were taken along our lane not far from our cottage as the sun was coming up.

Being the New Year, as always, our first job of the year is to do the accounts. We did them over two days, found all the nessassary paper work and after a while managed to balance them. Although our buisiness is only small compared to some, there are still new things about accounting I learn while doing them and I always try be more organised throughout the year. They can now go off to the accountant and we can relax!

We are both back to work a little tomorrow, I have lots of emails and mockups to do and Nick has just started a pastel portrait and we will be back to work fully on Monday. Ill post more then : )

Hi Everyone!

I hope you all had a wonderful Christmas! I am just popping in to post a couple of photos of Ammy at Christmas. He certainly enjoyed himself as you can see with his treats and toys..although still taking it easy while playing!

Did Santa bring anything nice for you all this year? Nick bought me a Wii with the Wii Fit Plus with the balance board which is just so much fun! I have been running, cycling, flying like a chicken, hula hoping, kung fooing, boxing skateboarding, and having snowball fights too! There’s so much to do on there, and there’s the serious side too so I have been doing yoga and core exercises too mixed in. Even Ammy has been on the board..well he sat on it at least!! Nick also got me Snowboarding for my birthday (yes another year older..but wiser!) and I love snowboarding games so thats been great fun too.

I have also had some amazing cookery books from my family and friends, my new years resolution is to cook even more this year. I try to make all our meals from scratch with fresh ingredients, and I had a Nigel Slater and two Hugh Fernley Whittingstall books which will really help. We’ve already made the potato and leek soup with some home made crusty Ciabbatta bread from the Nigel Slater one..although I do admit to adding some double cream in for good measure….! Good job we have the wii fit!

So all in all we have had a wonderful Christmas and I hope yours has been good too!  The computer has been off for the duration and its been a lovely restful week. We are both in the studio today, we are cleaning and organising, getting ready for going back to work in the New Year, sort of like an early spring clean! I hope you are enjoying yourselves wherever you are! Cheers!

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year

We would like to wish all of our clients a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. With Best wishes for 2010 – we hope it will be a sucessfull and prosperous one for you all!