April 2023 Update

April has been another busy month for my pet portrait business. Here is what I’ve been up to:

Commissions completed

I’ve completed 6 commissions, including some challenging portraits where the reference photos were less than ideal. One of the great things, though, about a pet portrait drawn or painted by a talented artist, is that old or imperfect photographs can be brought to life. I enjoyed the challenges and was really pleased with the results.

Content added

I’ve also posted some more blogs and articles on my website this month. You can now read about the fascinating history of pet portraits, look at 10 ways I’m thinking of advertising my business (including a preview of my newly designed business cards), and get my top 10 tips on how to find the right pet portrait artist for you. While obviously I’d love people to commission me, I’ve tried to be as objective as I can and recognise other styles and mediums. I’ve added an article on 10 famous artists and their pets and finally, as AI art is a hot topic in the art community at the moment, an important question for me is will AI replace pet portrait artists any time soon?

I’ve also added a new mini portrait gallery to showcase my increasingly popular 4x4 mini portraits.  

Followers increased

I’ve been posting more regularly on Instagram recently to build my following there, and I now have over 20K followers. This is important as most of my clients still come through that platform. The next milestone is 50K which seems a long way off at the moment! My twitter and Facebook accounts are also growing and I do occasionally get a commission through them but I’d love to speed things up somehow. I may need to look at advertising at some stage. 

Fast track option considered

This month I had a client who needed their portrait in a matter of weeks not months. Fortunately I had some time set aside for non-urgent tasks and personal projects, so I postponed them in order to complete the portrait. It made me think, though, that I could set up a fast track service. I wouldn’t be able to do it very often, but for those situations where timescale was more important than cost it might be a helpful option. Most pet portrait artists get pretty booked up so paying something like 50% extra to receive your portrait in a matter of weeks rather than months might be worth it for some. It would be quite a big premium for larger pictures but for my mini pet portraits, at current prices, it could mean paying just £26 extra to receive the completed framed artwork in two to three weeks rather than three to four months.    

Next month already begun

I can’t believe it’s May already and only two months left of my first year as a full time artist. I have 5 commissions lined up for this month, plus I hope to begin work on setting up a new office/studio space. I also want to write more about how I improve low quality reference photographs.