I started to paint pet portraits professionally in 2009. With the pet portraits I only use pastels because I felt very comfortable with this media and was using it from an early age. Plus, it is quite popular with pet portraits and has a great ability to show the softness of the fur.

In spite of my great love for pastels, I always wanted to start working with oil paints and try to sell my original oil paintings to the public. To be perfectly honest, I was not sure what to choose oil or acrylics. My main goal was to achieve brighter and more vibrant colours which was not possible to achieve with the pastels.

But even with my strong desire to start working with paints, it took me years to get to it. I was kind of scared of the paint, I felt like it will not be as forgiving as pastels and obviously, no experience in oil or acrylic paintings constantly was putting me off my intention.

Finally, I bought some good quality art materials, and looked through some good tutorials on the subject and went for it!

Now I can say with absolute confidence that my worrying thoughts were wrong. I should not be afraid of paint! Good quality paint is an absolutely wonderful and flexible medium to work with. I would advise any artist who thinks that oil painting is a hard job, just give it a go, it is not difficult, it is absolutely wonderful and enjoyable! Just make sure you get good quality art materials and go ahead!

Oil in particular is very forgiving and gives you great flexibility and time to correct anything you want. You can use different mediums to make it dry faster or the other way around, whatever suits you. 

Initially, I tried acrylics but was struggling a bit with how fast the paint is drying off and I couldn’t create the fluid strokes which I would like to. Though I liked the vibrancy a lot.

But when I tried painting with oil I felt that that was it! I loved it and found that it is not scary at all to work with a brush instead of pastel sticks and pencils.

Now I can spend hours creating my oil paintings and it is such a joy! I can achieve bright, vibrant and crisp colours with oil, exactly what I was looking for. My subjects are still our beloved pets and most likely this will stay my favourite subject for years to come.

Before the sale, original oil paintings have to be varnished to be protected and it takes quite a while for them to dry off before varnish can be applied. But it is worth waiting. I have painted a few original oil paintings for sale now and they will be ready to be sold this summer. At the moment they are waiting to be varnished. Nowadays oil paintings can be varnished much quicker using the new style varnishes.

There are a couple of original oil paintings for sale available in my shop and there are plenty more to come. So, please feel free to browse through my collection of Original Artwork.

Nowadays people can easily buy original oil paintings online and in galleries. It is wonderful that we have such a great variety of galleries and all sorts of styles in art which will suit any taste. It feels amazing to be able to display your artwork in the gallery.

And what a great pleasure to hang at home the one and only original oil painting of your choice.

I also think that being able to buy original oil paintings directly from the artist is a great thing as well. This is where we are so lucky to be able to sell online and communicate directly with the customers.