An Early Christmas Present for Me!

Regarding Christmas, I have bought myself a digital compact camera, (Leica D-Lux 4) which will be ideal for carrying around to clients and once I have got to grips with it, should take some great photos!

To date I have had a play with the settings and uploaded a few shots taken on our usual walk around the field, where we met up with Cassie's pal Benji and also taken various "arty" shots in the garden.

The camera has had good reviews and true to these I have enjoyed using it so far, messing around with grainy black and white mode and depth of field/ focus.

In fact it seems more versatile than my DSLR plus it is easier to carry around and more user friendly.

A good reason to go on a few extra dog walks as an excuse for taking some more photos!

Well its now time to get back to the easel and carry on with the pet portraits over the weekend...

Christmas Commissions... This post will self destruct in five seconds!

It seems like ages since I have had time to write an artist's blog update for the site!

It might be due to the fact that I have several large pet portraits to complete for the Christmas deadline, some large and others not so big.

By "LARGE", the biggest canvas that I have ever worked on is an enormous five foot by four foot commission.

This will be a contemporary pet portrait of three slightly exotic animals, should be great fun to paint in oils on this scale. However... other than that I'm sworn to secrecy.

I also have six traditional style dog portraits to be painted in oils on the go. They are in various stages of completion but are all looking good so far!

Cassie has also had an early present of a harness, which was intended to stop her pulling on the lead so much and worked for a couple of weeks, till she got used to it. I think we will both need some more intensive lead training in due course! However, I feel much happier with her safely restrained when we go out on car journeys, especially in Summer when she might just go out for a ride in the Sebring.