Pet Portrait Artists Melanie & Nicholas

General information

Nicholas and myself met at Bournemouth and Poole art college in 1994. I remember to this day the first moment I met him! He was wearing a grey coat and had a big multi coloured rucksack on. It was the start of our history. We successfully completed our studies exhibiting in the Mall Galleries in London for our final exhibition.

We knew that we wanted to paint and draw animals and wildlife and I had already had my first commission to paint a Labrador while at art college. After a few years of figuring everything out, working for illustration agencies, we finally started our business officially in 1997.

We started painting pets - dogs, cats and horses well before the internet. Crazy huh! Kids these days don't know what it was like. The world was definitely a smaller place. If you wanted to learn you went to a library or read magazines. Which was where we started.

We advertised at exorbitant rates in dog magazines to promote our work. People would call us to order a brochure, which we made on a word processor, and we sent it to them in the post. They would then send hard copy photos along with a cheque for a deposit and we would start their pet portrait.

We were thrilled when the internet was starting to be available for the general public and we were early adopters to both computers and the internet. Our first computer only had 3mbs of hard drive! Can you believe it! We had our first website by 2000 and were really just waiting for computers and dialup internet to be popular in people's homes. I say dialup. Only people of our age will remember trying to call someone on their landline only for it to be engaged as they were online! No mobile phones then either.

So in the next 6 years we became proficient at web design and our craft. We were one of the first pet portrait sites online and I still maintain to this day that we were the first website to show the work in progress of our artwork. Showing anyone artwork before it was completed was a huge deal for an artist. But I felt that customers might like to see their pet portrait develop. I was right! Now it's the norm.

In 2007 we moved to our little cottage in what we hope it will be our forever home. We have been renovating it over the 10 years while living here. From a buisiness perspective our pet portraits buisiness has been able to grow exponentially. We built a dedicated studio space in our garden which enables us a 'long' commute every day. It also enables us to have room to paint and draw larger portraits for clients which is key! There aren't many artists offering this service so if you would like a huge portrait of your pet - we are your artists!

Over the years we have painted and drawn pets in all of the different media available. From this experience we have decided on a professional level that both oil painting and pencil drawing are not only our favourite mediums to work with, but we feel they enable us to produce the most realistic and artistic portrait for our clients.

We love our job, we wouldn't do anything else....we hope you like our work too!