So I have learnt a valuable lesson since I started my art business. As the artist I look at photos and imagine what the end product will look like. I kind of have an image in my head from the photos. I then put together a sketch for my customer. During a few of my commissions my customers have asked for more colour than I would have added to what started as a black and white ink drawing. The end result has been liked and loved by all my customers. I now ask a lot more questions; so bear with me. I understand how to put together art but really want to know what my customer wants to see.

My husband has been off hitting some golf balls today. So I have been sitting and doing another art commission drawing a house in Woodley Park. It feels great to really crack on and draw something for someone else to enjoy. I know I am creating something that is dear to the owner or recipient of the art. Our home is in fact our castle! I am gearing up to draw the property I am living in for the owner next week. 

Today I have set my sights on updating my website. I have decided to offer only certain merchandise items on my site. So I have added a t-shirt tab and will add an acrylic tray tab. The trays are quite good. I use mine for a drinks tray and all bits and bobs. It is a plastic tray with sides and hand holds with my art in the base facing the viewer. I am wearing one of the t-shirts which are unisex and have a round neck like the picture on the website. I am a size medium if that helps people with sizing and I am an AUS size 12 or a US size 10 female. So I better get back to setting up the acrylic tray tab!

Over the last couple of days I have done a bit of work sorting out my website and some marketing. The website bulldoze (that's what it has felt like) takes several days to achieve because there is a fair bit of work to make something look good.

Not only do the images have to be spot on, correct colour and aligned right but the text needs to align and have correct spelling. I even found some images that still had some obscure file number as their heading. 

I also did a walk around of my neighbourhood, cherry picking some houses I would like to draw, and dropping off flyers in the mail boxes with flaps. I have more flyers but intend to drop those off on Sunday. You never know I may see some real people to chat to about my art and not waste the flyer on someone who isn't interested. I am aware this is very hit and miss but it is better to just get my name / business out there.

My next attempt at advertising is making up a couple of car magnets for my art business.

I am sitting here updating the mugs page on my website. I will soon disable mugs in the normal print products warehouse in the back end of my website. It takes some time so I will continue to plug away at this tomorrow. I figured I needed to make the main merchandise products like - tote bags, mugs and phone covers readily available. So totes are done, mugs are up now and phone covers will be a future adventure. Out for now and I will be back plugging away at the mugs tomorrow.

I have been asked to draw a very small logo for a company. The image is only 24mm high and so far 93mm wide. Sometimes I think creating something smaller is more complicated than something large. Today I am thinking 'little things make me happy'....

I've been paying my vet in cash, and mention each time, that my dog is eating into my art profits. Last visit was costly because my dog had a biopsy, which turned out thankfully, to be a benign tumour. Yesterday he had a case of the runs and some blood in his poo. As my vet said 'if he was a human he would be in the emergency department with similar symptoms'. As it turned out the visit wasn't a waste of time because my dog Chase was suffering colitis and a case of round worm. This visit required some medication and a break from the dog park for a couple of days. 

When I was leaving the surgery I was asked if I would consider creating a new art business card for my vet. Wall art could be created and possibly turned into a business card using photoshop. I handed over a business card and I will see what happens if the owners of the practice like my art. 

I also dropped a flyer for my business into my neighbour and his partner's house around the corner from where we live. I believe they are both real estate agents. I need to drop in a few more flyers when I come back from France in mid-May. I'm always considering new ways to grow my art business. I've even featured in a friend's art magazine but I will blog about that when I have had time to take a photo. 

I've had a busy few weeks completing some more art commissions. I have completed a couple of ink houses and a couple of dog portraits. The owners of the commissions have been impressed with the level of detail in the ink houses and expression in the dog drawing/paintings. I have also created a new tab titled 'Commissions' where I have been uploading any art commissions for printing. The tote bags and greeting cards are in a separate tab and I have added images to these tabs on request. 

This week I will be headed to France for an 8 day cheese experience and hope to get some time to draw some sketches. I have wanted to go on this cheese tour for several years but wasn't too keen on the 24 hour flight. Well, since we are in Washington DC it is only an 8 hour flight to Dublin and a couple more hours to Paris. Then from Paris I catch a train to meet up with my cheese tour. The first day we will be having a tour of some architecture in Dijon which I am particularly interested considering I have spent a few months drawing houses in Washington DC. Then we head to a large food market and cook dinner that evening with a chef. The following day we start touring some of the cheese factories to learn how the French do cheese. 

If anyone is interested in a house/pet portrait then I will be starting up again when I am home from France. 

Last night we attended the Air and Space Forces Charity Gala at the Washington Nationals Ballpark. I donated an American Bald Eagle Horizontal canvas print to raise funds for American veterans and their families. I met some interesting people at the event. I also saw another artists wall mural that he created using house paint. There are so many talented artists, that I am sure are in hiding, and he was one of them. My print will soon be hanging in a retired US Air Force member's office. He was lovely and was travelling home today. 

Another cool thing that we were able to do was to enter the bleachers and hit some base balls with the Nationals players. They went easy on us though, throwing the balls softer than if they were being thrown at the opposition. I feel privileged to have had the opportunity to attend this event and it is not one I will forget any time soon.

I am excited to say my art customers are driving me to use different techniques for their house commission drawings/paintings. I suppose I should be calling them mixed media images since they have black ink as the main component, and coloured ink, texta, and watercolour as highlights. One of my customers liked watercolour and encouraged me to give it a go. It worked out and I have been using this technique on the houses going forward. I'm still stippling (small dots and dashes) with the ink because I think this gives the images some depth and character.

So I have been busy creating commissions of house drawings/paintings. They are sketched and then ink and coloured ink/watercolour are applied. The drawings can take several days to produce. In between commissions I have updated my website to take payment before I commence applying the ink. This is to help me out by making sure the customer is happy with the under drawing before I apply the ink. Ink is not an easy medium to work with and I cannot rub it out. So far I am impressed with how the new change in practice has worked. My friend who is an editor suggested the changes to make my life easier and to really solidify the business practice of working on commissions. I have also put the price up slightly to cover my hours of work spent drafting the drawing, inking it and liaising with people about their needs. If you would like to check out some of the commissions I have created a page called house commission examples. Alternatively, you can check out my facebook / instagram where I post about my work @meechgould

Last weekend I posted a photo of a client's house in Chevy Chase. The house was drawn in ink and texta on hot rolled paper. I was overwhelmed by the interest in this drawing. I would like to send my thanks to everyone who has supported me and signed up to have their house captured in ink. I have a list of people interested and will manage each house with the detail it deserves before moving on to the next design.

I am hoping to add some information about my ink house drawings to help people know how I make them and the cost. I am having a few technical issues and have tried to upload an information page several times. I am going to speak to my website support tomorrow to see what I can arrange. 

If you are trying to figure out what to get someone who has everything or would like to gift yourself a present then maybe it is a drawing of a house (or what we might know as our own personal castle). We work hard for our house and it is nice to have an artists rendition of it hanging just inside the door somewhere.

That makes me think of the Australian movie - 'The Castle'. If you haven't seen it then rent out this classic Australian film. It is about a working-class family from Melbourne, Australia who fight city hall, after being told they must vacate their beloved family home to allow for infrastructural expansion.

So I am thinking of contacting some real estate agents in the Washington DC area to see if they are interested in commissioning me for a building drawing. The drawing would be provided to a new owner and paid for either by the owner or the agent. It is an exciting concept which might gain some ground. I suppose you never know until you give it a go.

People either like it or need it to fill a space. It is often given as a gift because that person you are buying for already has a lot of other items and this is just something different.

I know, when I am shopping in gift stores or for any piece of art, that I look for something unique. Just recently, I visited Colorado and purchased a couple of Christmas decorations. I believe these decorations are also pieces of art. I know there are still 295 days till Christmas, but I like collecting these items, from places I am unlikely to visit again as a keep sake. 

So today I went to my friends house to learn a bit more about photoshop. We worked on a few of the images to transform a couple more into PNG files. So my two emu heads now has a translucent background. Over the next few days more of these will pop up on my website.

I figured why not create some ink art on some birch. So far I have drawn an echidna in ink and coloured pencil. I purchased some birch (wood panels) to create some designs more as a bit of a trial than anything to do with my art business. I'm not too sure what I will do with these yet but I think they would make some great smaller gifts. I have some 8x10 " and 9x12 " panels to create some further designs. I would like to draw a dachshund next. Little sausage dogs are so cute. Then I need to get back to my pastel painting of an echidna. So I am now procrastinating and need to get back to what I love - drawing and painting!

So today I have tried for 3 hours unsuccessfully to alter the background in a photo. What I would like to do is remove the background in an image and then refine the edges. This will allow for the square around an image to become transparent. I have figured out how to remove the background around the image and download it as a PNG but not how to make the image look pretty. I believe I will need to phone a friend on this one because You Tube isn't enough! What I would like to do with this type of image is to create a t-shirt without the white square background around the image. Oh well, back to the drawing board and I need some more help. 

My friend told me a funny story about her boss buying some totes for Christmas in 2022 that was too good not to share. He purchased tote bags to provide each of his workers a gift at Christmas time. Let me say that I think this is a marvellous idea because not only does the person receive a present but they don't have any paper wasted and the rest of the gift is inside the bag.

But getting back to the story. My friend said the bags arrived and the pictures on the totes were Australian native animals mating. In the end her boss didn't use the bags because they were inappropriate to give to his workers, instead he bought some other plain bags to wrap his gifts. I laughed pretty hard because I could imagine her bosses surprise. So she recommended my site for 2023 tote bags because she knew I created some Australian ink images. 

So I thought I should write about Valentines Day which is the next big event on my calendar. My husband and I both bought each other a dessert item last year for Valentines Day.

I purchased some chocolate and dipped some strawberries. Little did I know that the chocolate I bought was not really great and it would make the strawberries taste awful. He brings me this little cake in a container that looked like it came from Woolworths in Australia (a standard supermarket like Safeway). It was actually from a little corner shop called Stachowski Market which sells some home made items that taste amazing. Let me tell you - it did taste amazing.

Don't just imagine owning an amazing piece of my art. Why my website when there are plenty of others? Well, it is bright, detailed and colourful and I think they will love it.

It is damn cold here in Washington DC today at -10 Celsius which is 14 Fahrenheit. I had to look up the conversion because I still talk mainly in Celsius. I am also still pondering about why people should buy my art. Well because it is good value, fun and great to look at on your wall or a t-shirt. I'm signing out for today because we are headed to an ice hockey game. I'm not too sure who is playing but I have been forewarned that the game will be action packed. I have my winter UGGs on my feet that are fleece lined and my Jack Wolfskin Jacket. Hopefully one day my art will be as famous as one of these brands. One can only hope!

I'm not sure if anyone reads these posts yet but I enjoy writing them.

Today I plan to login for a marketing tutorial to learn more about selling art. To tell you the truth, I believe there needs to be a store front associated with a website to sell products. People need to touch and see a product in order to be happy that they are going to receive what they think they pay for (which I understand). I'm happy to FaceTime and show people my original products. The prints on different mediums (paper, canvas, metal and wood) and merch (mugs / t-shirts) I have printed are top quality.

I have read complaints about other art stores and people not receiving quality prints, however some of those prints look quite underwhelming on the internet. If you purchase something from my site and are not happy with the print quality then I contact the printers and can organise for them to assess the print.

I also tried printing my art on canvas with a different printer (not the one on my website) and ended up throwing them out. The quality was quite poor but I paid a bit less. So I suppose I also had a lesson and learnt that you get what you pay for. I suppose I was being lazy and not wanting to go to a physical store!

So what is next? I'm thinking a painting of a bulldog. I love these dogs because they have a lot of character. I think that is why I am so fond of my West Highland Terrier. He is a big dog in a small body. I need to figure out the type of colours to use and the paper. If it is on pastel then should the paper be light or dark? That will depend on the colours used the paint the bulldog. Or should the bulldog be in ink or water colour. I'm not too sure yet. I will start with a sketch and then figure out how I am going to put the piece of art together and in what format. I love having an idea and building on that idea. So if you ever have an idea then please sketch that idea and then you can develop it into a piece of art. 

Well tis the silly season again. I have been creating some Christmas images using a caricature penguin design, with ink as the medium. I've also just painted a penguin using pastels which looks quite cool (no pun intended). I plan to update this image as soon as my photographer can assist (maybe this afternoon if he isn't having a snooze).

Pastels are a harder medium to work with because they are more time consuming and difficult to apply, however they create images in vivid colours and designs. Applying pastels is like working with layers of dusty chalk. My ink work is the polar opposite. These images are detailed and technical but not really messy to apply.

If you would like me to design something that you would like to see on your wall or on some merch then let me know. The originals and prints are high quality and won't leave you disappointed. There is even AI on the website to help you figure out what size etc to purchase for your wall. To make sure you don't miss out on an update or promotion subscribe to my website.