Wholesale Pet Products

Allison has finalized our wholesale shopping site. If you have a doggy boutique or know someone that is running an upscale pet oriented business you might want to check out our wholesale offerings. We also sell at wholesale prices to doggy breed groups and rescue orgs for fundraising activities.
Check out artpaw.net to learn more.

More Tips For Pet Portrait Artists

Today I offer up a few tips for other portrait artists ... please leave a comment and share your own insights if you have time.

#1 Build those relationships!
I am working on this one myself. We have all heard this before and it is true... "word of mouth" advertising is the best kind. I have tried to maintain lists and do mailings and I find this is not my strong suit, however I am working on it.

#2 Keep your sanity ... do artwork for yourself too!
I love doing commissions and yet I find that being able to play with my own "non-directed" artwork keeps me very happy and more than willing to jump through creative hoops for my clients as needed. When you have a lot of freedom in your personal work you tend to be more open to advice and direction in your commercial endeavors.

#3 Go to an art museum or gallery at least once a month
When we were younger it was easy to find ourselves at gallery openings several times a month, after all if the art was bad you still had the free wine and cheese. As we get busier and older we often forget about all the great art that is just down the block. Artists need visual stimulation, and while the web is amazing, there is something special about seeing art in the real world.

#4 Experiment
Try something new every week. Work in media that you are not good at, paint a subject you have never painted, take a class. Do something to push yourself out of your comfort zone, because the "comfort zone" in our commercial work is our biggest enemy.

#5 Teach, share, and lead.
If you have been doing your own thing for awhile, you must have some of your own special techniques, and ideas for success. You can regard every little thing you do as "secret sauce" and guard your knowledge carefully or you can share and earn the rewards that come from being a leader. In business it is often hard to feel safe sharing, but when you can connect with other artists that also have a lot to give you find that it gets easier and easier to take off the armor.

Happy Easter!

Happy Easter!
Originally uploaded by artpaw.

This is my Ajax with bunny ears. Happy Easter everyone. Not much to blog about today. We will back at work on Tuesday.

Izzy the Dappled Doxie

Izzy is a Traveling Girl
Originally uploaded by artpaw.

This is Miss Izzy and she is my 100th post to Flickr. I hope to play some more with this girl over the weekend and add her to the site soon.

Izzy is an unusual little dappled Doxie with one blue eye and one brown eye. She is shown here in her green traveling tote. Sometimes you see tiny little toy pups in bags and you sorta wonder if the dog is a fashion accessory or what. This little girl on the other hand looks like a real scrapper to me, and when you read her human's Flickr blog you discover that this little pup gets to go hiking in a backpack and she travels to many cool places other than the Mall and Starbucks.


You can see Izzy's original pic here.

2 addictions

1 and 2

What you see

If the previous post made you think of how powerful not-so-free association can be, then you might like Logo.Hallucination. Its author, Christophe Bruno, used a pattern-recognition software to analyze images on the net and discover similarities with known brand logos.

And our dear Courbet can apparently be associated to Corus:

Now, here is the crazy part: after discovering the image, Bruno sends an e-mail to its owner:

Madam, Sir,

We inform you that our automated monitoring spiderbot has detected a potential infringement of Intellectual Property Law in the digital image located at the address […]. Indeed this image includes a total or partial representation of the logotype of the brand XXX. Since you are responsible for the diffusion of this image on the Internet, we would like to remind you that such unauthorized use of copyrighted work could be liable for statutory damages. Moreover, it may have violated other US federal laws, including (among others) the Digital Millenium Copyright Act and the Consumer Fraud and Abuse Act.

Accordingly, we hereby suggest that you should contact immediately, and possibly through our agency, the company XXX so that we negotiate with them a friendly contract which would allow a regularization of this situation, according to the following possibilities:

Case 1: You might be financially rewarded by company XXX insofar as this situation constitutes advertising and promotion for the brand XXX. In this case you must explicitly indicate the reference to the company XXX by adding its logo to the aforesaid image and insert a link towards the site of this company.

Case 2: You wish to continue the exploitation and diffusion of your image without mentioning the company and in this case you will have to settle reproduction rights with this company insofar as the latter authorizes you to further exploit and diffuse your image.

If you fail to comply with these requests, the company XXX will have no choice but to proceed in a manner appropriate to protect its valuable intellectual property rights.

Sincerely yours

Logo.Hallucination

Scary? Funny? Ironic? Insofar as this is an artistic project, it sounds hilarious (especially if we were to try and find the author of the Origin of the World)(pun intended). But if internet cafés started off as an artistic project, why can't a ruthless fight over image rights start off as a funny piece of software?














(via)

Dandelion

Dandelion #3
Originally uploaded by artpaw.

This is a macro shot of a dandelion in my yard. Funny how a common weed can have it's own inner world. How many things do you walk by every day without pausing to really notice? Learning to see is an ongoing process for an artist. My husband and I have found our recently adopted hobby of photography has made us see more in the world even when we do not have a camera at our side.
If you click the photo above you will be taken to my Flickr pics.