I cant believe its been 6 days since I blogged last, it seems to have flown. Things have been busy here and various pieces of artwork I have on the go are beginning to take shape and I will blog stages later.

First of all to catch you up a bit on the week, yesterday was a day off for us as we again had no electricity. The small garage up the road to us is having three-phase electricity put in and so we have had three days this month without any power as they have been putting in new poles and lines. Its all planned days so we know well in advance, but of course if we don’t have any power for lights we can’t paint. We live in a rural area and there are only about 6 cottages and houses on our lane so it hasn’t affected too many people. The garage is very handy as they come and collect our car and deliver it when it needs anything done : )

Anyway instead of going up into the mountains and slip sliding down the hill in ice like last time : ) (see previous post!) we went back to the farm and stopped the day with my parents. I still wanted to work (workaholic as per usual) and so re did the audio files for my site. They aren’t wonderful but they work and I think they put across swiftly and succinctly what I wanted to say, hopefully giving visitors to my site a better idea of the commissioning process. I will redo them one day, I think to speak flawlessly without any ‘umms’ and to do the whole thing in one go would be my ultimate challenge..but its very difficult! I have the utmost respect for TV presenters.

http://www.pet-portraitartist.com/ordering-information.htm

I have also managed to redo my ‘Happy Clients’ section, which I have actually been working on for the last couple of months on and off. Its finally come together and is now online. I hadn’t updated the testimonials since 2007 which I am not really happy about. Things like this do get left due to the amount of artwork which I guess is much more important. Anyway its much more organised and I have added lots of new photos clients have taken so its worth checking out.

http://www.pet-portraitartist.com/testimonial-home.htm

So as I said at the start of the post I have been beavering away here with the first stages of lots of my oil portraits and I will be adding some stages soon. Also will add a final scan of an Alsation I have been working on in between times : )

Hope you are all well and again thank you for those who have been filling out my survey – fantastic feedback! Keep them coming!

This is a portrait I did a few weeks ago and the client has sent me photos of the portrait framed and I think it works beautifully. They have opted to have the name on the mount too which works well and something that we can provide with our own framer too as I think its a really lovely idea. Im in mid way stage with the staffy portrait and will blog it soon and am then onto some horse portraits.

Here is my latest horse pet portrait, that was commissioned last year. in fact it was a gift voucher from last Christmas and they emailed me photos in about September time. I had such a long list of clients to do that their name has just come up in the client list now.  My next portrait is from a recommendation of a previous client which is always fantastic, Its for a birthday gift in Canada in a few weeks, I will hopefully blog it later on this week.

This is a photo of one of my latest portraits framed. Our framer is fantastic, everything is hand crafted. Normally we send him the portraits to be framed and he sends them on to the client, however this time we needed to collect some supplies and mount boards from him so we took the portrait to him to be frame while we waited. The process is quite fascinating and the attention to detail is superb. He is meticulous in every detail, even the ends of the string on the back are heated with a special implement and pressed to the backing so they don’t fray and stick out the side of the frame. Its great to watch a real craftsman at work.

This is my next commission for a birthday in February.  It is being sent to the framers today and hopefully I will have a photo of it framed soon. The client is really pleased and he has opted for the flat gold frame which I think will work well with the dogs colouring.

I am just finishing a portrait of a white horse which hopeful will be bloged tomorrow.

This week has been interesting to say the least!

Monday we had a day off, it was one of my family members birthday so I was chief cook and we all had a great time, so obviously Sunday was also a day off as it was a cleaning day before everyone arrived. Tuesday we didn’t have any electricity all day due to maintenance and upgrades on our line, so of course we couldn’t work. We took to day to visit our framer in the mountains to collect some frames. Its quite a drive just under an hour and a half and we decided to take a picnic and take a detour around the mountain and back home again. We were doing ok, the sun was shining, the colours were beautiful on the hills, a rich deep ochre red colour…until we got higher and higher and hit the snow. It was a bit slidy to say the least and we ended up reversing backwards down and around two hairpin beds to safety. Imagine this is just an open single lane road on a steep incline without barriers! We were the only ones on the road, apart from a gritter lorry down in the valley we passed along they way…why wasn’t he up the top of the mountain!! : ) It was an experience to say the least!

So back to work Wednesday and i have been working on the second portrait of Hocky and Missy for a client in Hong Kong who also wants to give one to friends in Singapore. This isn’t the first time I have done two portraits of the same dog for clients and I try to make sure each portrait is very similar. I often wonder if someone could work out which was drawn first. The first time you draw something you are unfamiliar with the subject so you are going to be slower, and the second time you should be more aware of the subject, and by all accounts it should be better! But of course the second time you draw something you may be less observant as you could possibly be relying on memory rather than keep looking at the reference. These questions often come up when I teach students. I wonder which you think was drawn first??! : )

Oh and finally I have had a few submissions from the websurvey thank you sooo much, it has been extremely helpful and I hope that I have been able to make some improvements already! Keep them coming!

Just a quick post over breakfast today as loads has been happening here and I will make another post later today, but I wanted to blog about the new survey I have made and would love for any of my readers who are interested to take just a couple of minutes to fill it out. It is completely anonymous, you don’t have to fill your personal details if you don’t want to and it will really help me improve my blogging for you all. I have been keeping a blog since 2005, which is amazing to think that’s nearly 5 years but I have never really had any feedback so it woudl be fantastic to receive any – good or bad as I want to make it the best I can for my readers!

Survey – http://www.pet-portraitartist.com/blog-survey.htm

I will blog again today as I have a scan of two dogs in pencil…. : )

Hi All,

Here’s my latest portrait in pencil. This is a portrait that was commissioned last summer, however it took a while to organise photos and the final design so I am so pleased to have been able to email the final scan to the customer as i know they have been waiting a long time for this. It was for a birthday gift and I know the recipient will be delighted its complete. I have already started two portraits, the ones for Singapore and Hong Kong which I will post soon.

After working this last couple of weeks on the London Art College website and getting that up and running with the new design and the changes they needed to make, im finally back working on my site again trying to finish of the changes I started before Christmas. It seems so long ago now, but I decided to have a new top bar and try again to sort the navigation. I’m so pleased with the top bar design and want to make Nicks similar with some more photos of our happy clients. Regarding navigation I had been having problems all last year, I tried so many, some just didn’t work, some were browser incompatible, and so I just opted for a basic black one as a last resort as I got so busy with portraits, didn’t have any more time to fiddle with it. I think I have been through all the free css nav templates on the net! So im finally happy with this one. I also used it on the LAC site and now I need to update Nicks sites with it too. His sites desperately need updating, I’m trying to work an hour a day on web desing over breakfast so that I can split it up so its not too intense. Isn’t it time consuming! It certainly can eat up hours of valuable time.

So my job over this mornings breakfast was to move the last of the old shopping cart over, the fairy prints were the last to go. I still had them on the old cart on my site and if anyone would have bought them it wouldn’t have worked – opps! So finally they are done! You can see them at the link below.

http://www.pet-portraitartist.com/catalog/index.php?cPath=29_30

All i need to do now is go through the rest of the cart text and sort that out. I cant believe its Friday already, I hope that everyone has a lovely weekend and I will post again soon!

This is a final scan of a lovely cat pet portrait in pastel on velour that I have just completed to the size of 10 x 8. Sadly the cat is no longer with us and it is a gift for my clients young daughter so it will mean a lot to her. I am so pleased I have been able to bring back the image of the cat at least.

Stage one of the Akita will be posted tomorrow. I have only a couple of stages as I have been so engrossed I have nearly completed it without taking photos! Will post tomorrow.

Hi Everyone,

This weekend has been a pretty busy one all round. I have got caught up on all of my London Art College assessment, well apart from the ones that have just come through this weekend and their website I overhauled for the London Art College is going well. We have done a few extra updates on there this week and its getting to look a lot more colourful which is great! The forum incidentally is going well too, we have quite a few students joining and starting to  chat and show their work which is promising.

My main reason for blogging today was to show some photos I was sent by a client. She asked if her dog (which i had previously painted and have another for her to do this month) could be on one of the bookmarks, if you view down a few posts i think i mentioend it below. Anyway she has emailed me photos and they look AMAZING! I cant believe how lovely she has created them, they are perfect! I just love interesction liek this between myself and my celints and to create something like this is just the best!

Im back to my drawing today, I have nearly finished the dog by the lake and tree and im onto beautiful spaniels next for Hong Kong and Singapore.