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30 Dogs 30 Days - Pink Chihuahua

My very first Dog a Day painting, Pink, a little 4" x 5" panel, private collection (THANK YOU!). This is where things really began to take off. But let's go back in time a little first.

It's 2006. I had been creating larger than life sized pet portraits for about 5 years, selling them online (via ebay and my website). I was a little disillusioned, always moving from one commission to another, with little time for continued learning or experimentation (entirely my own fault). In October I decided to carve out a small window of time each day for just myself. An hour to push paint without any expectation but to have fun. I built a blog as a dedicated space to record my efforts, because I love to compartmentalize everything. Yes, everything. My Inner Marketer thought I should dovetail the daily project with the studio in some way, to further drive traffic to my website via keywords, regular updates and context similar content - so I chose to focus on dog portraits. As an added caveat, when a painting sold, I donated proceeds to animal welfare, because that simply felt right - these little dailies were to be bonus exercises to benefit my creative mental health, and as such, they could continue out into the world benefitting animals' lives, too. (For current collectors who really want a groan, these little gems sold for $20-40 each, 8x10s were $90!)

And the rest is history.

I got a little press, a TON of support from collectors and friends, and suddenly there was a Painting a Dog a Day community. My daily newsletter went out to 1000+ readers, wait lists for a Dog a Day portrait stretched into months, and I completely revamped my studio operations to focus on small portraits, 3-4 each week, with the remaining daily slots left for whatever I felt like painting. Which, for the most part the first year or two, was primarily dogs.

But my connection with canines started long before this, and in the next 30 days I will share some of those roots with you, along with some more recent stories, all connecting dogs and my artwork.

Stay tuned, invite your friends (because word of mouth is the best sort of endorsement), and share your own stories. Welcome to 30 Dogs 30 Days.

Warmly, Kim
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  1. Sand Hill Art3:18 PM

    The wonderful folks at Sanilac Co. Humane Society gave Maxx, a GSP, to me to thank me for fostering two dogs for them. Maxx was about eight years old when I got him; he had been tied up in a backyard and almost starved to death. He was afraid of EVERYTHING. It took several years before he even made eye-contact with me. I lost him to a stroke a year ago but I'll never stop loving him.

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