Shimmer

At last I can start posting my commissions on here now that Christmas is over. This painting is of Shimmer, a lovely young black lab and she was supposed to be a surprise Valentine's present but my customer was so thrilled with the painting that he couldn't wait and gave it to his wife on the day of opening the parcel! It was a lovely painting to do, helped by Shimmer being extremely cute and I worked with my customer to find a pose that was different to a normal head portrait as I felt such a young and vibrant labrador should be shown as such.

I'm glad to say I have some commissions lined up as I'm very worried about the coming year as portraits are a luxury item and many won't be able to treat themselves as they normally do. I'm going to concentrate on my originals this year too, incase things go quiet commission wise and also look for part time work, although I'm very picky as to what work I do due to my very short attention span - I get bored very easily! However, I have a big exhibition that I'm part of with 5 other equestrian artists in March so need to do a few more paintings for this. It's being held during Cheltenham Gold Cup races so I wanted to do at least a couple of racing paintings and, as my skills at photography are zilch, I've been searching for images from racing photographers to use and it's taken me ages to find some that I find interesting and not your normal racing scene. Also, to buy images from photographers can vary greatly in cost so I had to find someone who had interesting images plus was in my budget! I was lucky to find Tracy Roberts who has been able to provide me with some lovely photographs so keep an eye on my blog to see what I manage to produce over the next few weeks and also for further information about the exhibition.