I have now completed the portrait of Dizzy and our clients are coming from Singapore to collect Dizzy’s portrait while they are in the UK for a few weeks. The portrait is currently with Jane the framer and as soon as its back in the studio I will take photos. I think its going to looks fabulous as its being framed in our Traditional Flat moulding and so will be very grande!
Hope everyone has a lovely weekend!
Here is the final scan of Mia and Harry!
Now we are in our new studio and work is going well I am aiming to be more organised with our social media! Hopefully there will be a photo of each of our work stations every day or so for clients to see some candid photos taken on the iPad of us working in the studio. I will be posting photos here on the blog taken with the studio camera of the artwork in more detail.
We mainly use facebook and each have our own dedicated page, although we do have google+ and Twitter which we use occasionally. If you were over on Nick’s Facebook page this morning you would have seen a photo of both of the Mia and Harry paintings together along with Jack’s canvas which is all prepared waiting for Nick to start today. As soon as I have the first stage I will post photos here in a few days time.
I also posted a photo of Dizzy which is coming along well on my facebook page. Come on over and ‘Like’ our pages to keep up with our daily studio pics!
Here are the stages to the portrait of Mia and Harry when they are a little older. I am hoping that they will be visiting us at the new studio very soon and I cant wait to meet them! Final scan soon.
Here is the framed print of Tabatha. Our client who originally commissioned the painting of Tabatha last year, asked if we could create a stretched canvas, framed print for their friend in the USA. We were thrilled with the outcome, the quality of the print is absolutely superb and I have to say you would have a job to tell that it was not the original when viewing on the wall. Jane our framer, framed the print for us using the Oak Leaf frame along with the small inner linen slip. It will now be packed and sent to the USA this week!
Here is the lovely portrait of Murphy framed! Our client opted for the traditional flat frame and we think it works really well with Murphy’s colouring. We spent a long time with Jane the framer making sure we chose the correct moulding as not all of the mouldings went with Murphy’s colouring and tones. This one works perfectly though and it is complimented beautifully with an engraved plaque in bronze. Murphy will be off to the USA in the next few days!
We are now up and running in our new pet portraits art studio and today we can reveal photos of what it is like inside! It has been a long process to make sure everything is absolutely perfect for our working environment and it’s now all complete and a wonderful place to paint and draw!
For our clients that have been following our progress, we haven’t moved, we are still in our little cottage, we have converted what was our packing shed into a fully insulated, heated studio with double glazing and plenty of space to work.
I have added a few photos below and if you would like to see more photos and read all about it on our website visit our Pet Portraits Studio page >>
We are extremely excited about our new place to work, I have been catching up on admin and website updates for a number of days, you can see lots of new photos across our website from the home page to the framing gallery. Nick has completed the puppy portrait of Harry and Mia and he is working away on the second painting of Harry and Mia when they are a few months older.
We understand that this project has put us a little behind schedule and we are now working hard to catch up and we will be in touch with a personal email to all of our clients within the next few days.
My next blog post will be following soon with two framed portraits, one oil painting and one print!
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Here is Mia and Harry’s final scan, the portrait of them as the most gorgeous and cute puppies. Nick has already started the portrait of them a little older and I will have a next stage to it very soon.
This is a pencil portrait that I completed a few weeks ago before we moved out of the old studio into the new one. Its only now that I have been able to blog it. Its of two lovely dogs called Non and Stanley and our clients were thrilled, plus the recipient had a wonderful surprise! They very kindly took a photo of the portrait framed which I have added below and I really love the light wood that they have chosen, it works perfectly with the drawing!
Nick has been working on Mia and Harry and I will post more stages next!
Some of our regular followers and clients will know that we have been a little quiet on our blog and social media in the last couple of weeks. We have been working extremely hard on renovating our new studio getting it ready to work in. It’s now finished, we are back to work on our first full day today and it looks AMAZING! We are still in our same little cottage, we haven’t moved, we have renovated our packing shed into a fully working, insulated, garden art studio to work in full time all year round. We are so warm and cosy down here, we have much more room to move and its so quiet being down our garden in the little woodland area. We have windows both front and back one side looks into the garden and one side into a few trees and a field, so we are hidden away, its absolute bliss!
In total I think it has taken 7 weeks from the first day the builders arrived on May 27th to this weekend 12th of July installing the phone line and final bits and pieces. It took around two weeks once the builders had nearly finished to get it decorated, painting the walls and varnishing the floor and whenever we have taken on projects like this, we always underestimate how long the decorating will take.
Not only have we decorated in the studio, but we have revamped what was our old studio into a beautiful bedroom and that’s another room done in our cottage renovations. We asked our lovely neighbour DIY team to remove some old plasterboard and replace it with tongue and groove to tidy it up a little, and upon pulling off the old plasterboard we found old rustic wood paneling, which was lime washed and wallpapered in disintegrating newspaper from 1877! We know the cottage is over 300 years old but this proves that the paneling is at least 140 years old. So we saved as much of the remnants of the newspaper as we could, cleaned the wood paneling with a brush and wire wool, oiled the wood and it now looks stunning, it’s such a feature!
We are always so excited to do these little building projects, not knowing what we are going to find, going back in history with the cottage. Having done a lot of renovating in the cottage over the last few years, each time we are in chaos and a mess I vow never to take on any more building projects! At the end though it is so worth while but it just zaps all of your time and energy so I am quite relieved to be back to work! We only have one more room to do in the cottage and it will be the most difficult, the front room with the large inglenook, but I think we will leave that for a couple of years….
I will be taking some promotional photos this week for the website but as a little teaser here is a photo of our new door sign (Red Kite Studios is our business name) and Nick painting inside!
More posts to follow!
Here are the next stages of the Dachshunds! Its the big push now to get the new studio finished, we hope to be in by next weekend and its going to be a long week of finishing things off inside, decorating, staining the floor etc. I am nearly complete on the portrait of Non and Stanley and i hope to have a final scan in the next few days. I will then be on hand to help decorate the shed. Its all very exciting here at the moment, we have been taking lots of photos so will have the big reveal very soon!
Nick has been working on Mia and Harry’s oil painting and the first two stages are below. Our client is having two portraits painted of Mia and Harry, the first painting is of them as puppies, the second is when they are just under a year and the third and fourth will be commissioned as they grow. The portraits will be displayed together and so Nicholas has got them both on his easel at the same time to make sure there is a continuity between them for colour and tone.
I have been working on the pencil portrait of Non and Stanley and I’m about half way while the builders are working very hard on our new studio! They still have quite a bit more to do and once they have finished we will need to take a few days off form work to decorate and put all of our equipment and easels down there. I am hoping it will be up and running within the next couple of weeks. Its very exciting and its looking great so far. We have been taking photos so there will be the studio in progress photos coming soon!
Here is Murphy! Nick has now completed this beautiful Chow, the painting is really stunning. the portrait is 20 x 16 in size in oils on Italian Linen canvas. The colours have come out a lot brighter now that I have put the image below, however it should give you an idea of hat the painting looks like in real life. Murphy will be framed in the coming weeks and i will have photos once he is completed.
The electrician and carpenter are here today working on the studio but then three days gap and they will be back on Monday. We hope that the rest of the windows and roof will be done next week, weather permitting.
