Pet Portraits and Wildlife Art

Hi ho hi ho it's off to work we go! I'm hoping to speed up my work rate as I have quite a few portraits in hand at the moment, I'm not complaining, it's good to have them but I want to plough on rather than dawdle as I usually tend to. I did say my future portraits list was in no particular order and I will be working them to reach deadlines and moving them around to ensure everyone gets their portraits when they are needed. Therefore, I've made a start with Arthur and Macey's pet portrait. These two beautiful german shepherds came to my house for a photo session and I have to say they were much much larger than Willow so I'm in no doubt she'll be growing some more in the future. This is the beginning of Macey's head, she is 8 years old whereas Arthur is 7. They are very well behaved german shepherds (they do belong to a dog trainer so they should be!) and were a joy to have visit. Arthur did show interest in my rabbit Rex but other than that both were chicken, goose and pheasant friendly luckily and they strolled around without any problems at all.

And here is one of my favourite sights of the summer, the humble bumble bee, this one was busy on the lawn, Willow does take an interest in these as well as flies, wasps etc and she tries to catch them. This has now caused near disaster after she found a wasp nest in the woods and got stung on the nose several times, her face rapidly swelled up and I did begin to worry that maybe she had managed to swallow one which could make her throat swell up, after a good wasp removal session with the help of Dave we managed to get them all off her and a few hours later her face was back to normal. I'm hoping the stings were quite bad so she'll ignore them in future but somehow I doubt it.

And for anyone wondering about Pickle, and just for Sheila, here he is, out and about in the grass. He is in urgent need of putting on weight and loves munching through grass so at every opportunity I put him out in his pen.

And finally, my babies on a walk in the woods behind our house. There are quite a few rambling trails around us but I especially like one route out of the way where not may others venture, for one thing it's too far and a bit off the main track, the only thing is it does have a few puddles which Willow loves, she knows where they are so runs ahead to stand in them and then defend them from Zac and Gypsy, her favourite but filthy game.

She's the queen of the puddle, 3 of them Willow decided to splash about in, Zac was wise by this point and stayed behind me so he didn't get involved but Gypsy loves it and by the time we get home she's usually covered in mud, dirt, red puddle water and and bramble and very far from white!