Pet Portraits and Wildlife Art

Well I had to give up waiting for decent light to take a photo of this latest dog portrait. As you can see I caught a bit of reflection on the right hand side but after quite a few attempts I had to leave it as it is, and I think this is probably as good as it gets with the weather at the moment and the dark miserable evenings (I do hate winter so much)

This is Beamer, a 12 year old black and white cocker spaniel who is curretnly a magnificent 12 years old and much loved by his Mum. Isn't he beautiful with those big sad cocker eyes. I'm now just waiting to mount the portrait and then this one too will be sent in plenty of time for Christmas delivery.

We have had really cold weather here over the last couple of days and are expecting a bit of snow overnight so thankfully we've lit the front room fire and it's like a sauna at the moment, I'm not going back outside for anything apart from putting the animals to bed, an evening to be spent burning my toes in the grate I think!!!

This cat portrait is almost complete now, just a few finishing touches and a bit of tidying up before framing and posting. Thankfully in time for the deadline....phew!

I've also heard back that Andie's cat portrait arrived safely too, although it arrived early, it wan't supposed to reach it's destination until Monday so the postal service must be on it's toes this year.

And this is the sight which greeted us this morning. A couple of inches of snow and a good hard frost made our little lane a bit skiddy and slippy in anything but a truck. I decided to venture up in the woods with my dogs and all of the once muddy paths were rock solid although slippy. And also we had a visit from the fox last night. We had heard a vixen calling two nights ago and had decided to add some electric fencing around the wooden pens and it was planned for today, however, it seems she beat us to it and devastation has been reeked in one pen with just one little hen surviving. During my walk in the woods I came face to face with a fox, which is somewhat unusual so food must be scarce or hard to come by as foxes are a rare sight through the day. Regardless of what the fox had done in my garden though I wouldn't let my dogs chase her but luckily they didn't see her as she was quick as a flash into the scrub.

Back to work on the cocker spaniel portrait now and I've already made a start so hopefully I should be able to post a picture tomorrow.

Hope you are all keeping nice and warm!

Things have moved on with Frank's cat portrait and I've now started work on the twigs and leaves to the side of the portrait. I'm disappointed the images on here aren't as good as the real thing but hopefully with the weekend coming up I hope to get some brighter pictures in daylight I won't need to lift the background quite so much.

And finally I think all of the pages on my website have loaded up and are appearing in search engines but I have dropped a few places although I am still on page 1 of google, so I think a few tweaks here and there and hopefully I won't sink into the outerspace of the forgotten websites!

Well I seem to be having one disaster after another this week, if it could go wrong it would go wrong. The cocker portrait I was working on ended up being smudged and I was just sooooo annoyed I had to leave it for a while to get over it and will start it again in a few days, it was just typical as I'd spent most of the day working on it and had completed quite a big chunk, why couldn't I smudge it earlier into the work! I've also had computer issues and other stuff too boring to mention but which have really got up my nose and made my hot headed temper almost reappear which it hasn't for years so I did the decent thing and got on with Frank's cat portrait which I have to say I am enjoying even though it has jumped the queue!

So these are my local woods, I think I took this photo a week or so too late as the colours had been much brighter than this when I walked this particular path the time before. However, it's still a really pretty place and all of my dogs love it!

More of a close up so you can see the good quality of the frame.