Welcome to our new and shiny ‘Melanie & Nicholas Pet Portraits Art Studio Blog’ – 2014! We are thrilled to welcome you to our cozy corner of the internet!
As you may already know we are Melanie and Nicholas, the creative minds and passionate souls behind Melanie & Nicholas Pet Portraits. Our journey into the world of pet portraiture began many years ago when we met at art college and shared love for animals and a desire to capture the unique personalities that make our pets so special.
My first commission was at art college in 1994 and it bought tears to the owners eyes. I was hooked. It felt good to bring happiness to people and so my path was set! Nicholas and I officially started our pet portraits business in 1997. Yes it’s been a long time!
Blogging since 2005
As some of our regular readers may know we had a few technical issues with our old blog. Although it had been running fine on the surface, things were broken behind the scenes with a corrupt database. We were sad to loose all of our posts, however, here we are with a new blog and hope that our viewers and readers enjoy it!
Not sure when blogging actually started but we are very proud to say that we were there near the start. A friend asked us to write a guest post on theirs in 2004. Once we figured out its potential, we thought it would be great to keep a blog for our prospective clients. Hence our old blog was born in 2005. Let’s hope this new one can last longer!
Pet Portraits in Progress on our Blog
I had the idea of showing our portraits in progress to clients on our website back in January 2002. I am proud to say we were one of the first pet portrait artists to start showing the stages on our website.
Nicholas was quite shocked at the thought of showing our work unfinished, but of course it is now quite natural for artists to do this. When we were at art college, fellow students wouldn’t dream of allowing anyone to see their unfinished artwork and illustrations. Times have changed and showing artwork in varying stages is now a regular occurrence online.
When we started our blog, it seemed even more obvious to use that as a daily diary. It meant it could be kept, rather than the images we were adding on the website were being replaced when the paintings or drawings were complete.
Pet Portraits Websites – the Early Days!
Both Nicholas and myself were ready and waiting in the infancy of the internet to make a website. We were itching for regular homes to get internet and for people to start using it in their every day lives. There were no devices back then, no iPads or tablets and when Mobile phones were invented, they were just phones. We didn’t have our compact portable laptops either, just huge great big monitors and computer towers.
In 2001 we made a website under the name ‘Artists At Home’ – as thats what we were! We had made a Learn to Draw and Paint art course and made this website to promote it.
In 2002 we created a dedicated pet portraits site under our business name ‘Red Kite Studios’. We live din the heart of Red Kite country, where the birds would soar over our home, so it seemed quite apt.
The problem was not many people knew what a red Kite actually was, so in 2003 we decided to get a different domain name www.pet-portrait-artist.com which we felt had the actual words of our business in. We didn’t have it that long though as it was tied to a company called Easyspace who we had our website with at the time. We didn’t want to be with them any longer as they made us have an advert on every page one our website which we felt didn’t look professional.
So by 2005 we bought a new domain name www.pet-portraitartists.com and that was the start of this website you see today!
Our early versions of our websites were so antiquated. It’s interesting to look back at them on the internet archive ‘Wayback Machine’. This was our first one in 2001.
Melanie and Nicholas Pet Portraits!
Since moving to our very own little cottage in 2007 and always trying to innovate with our business, I’d like to think we are happy with how things are going with our online presence. We have two websites which you can bookmark along with this blog of course.
So why not subscribe and join us on this lovely adventure as we hope to spend the next few years – until we retire that is, creating portraits for clients all around the world. We are always happy to share our working lives with you and also some of our travels around Wales too. Along with adventures with Lily our Tibetan Terrier and hens in our garden of course!
We always love to hear from our readers, so please leave us a comment or email us at any time!
Melanie, Nicholas and Lily our Tibetan Terrier!
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