Art By Tasha - Blog
Launching hand drawn pet portraits and dog services (walking and boarding)
Wow, they say time flies when you’re having fun, and it seems my recent career change is a prime example. I am pleased to say “Art By Tasha” is just a month shy of one year since I registered my website domain. This ultimately led to me hanging up my recruitment boots at the end of 2025 and I am now living my dream life. No “corporate work” for me now. Instead, my day is full of fur babies of all shapes and sizes, all day, every day. This is because in addition to my hand-drawn pet portraits, I also walk dogs and offer dog boarding from my home in Sussex. All in all a huge change to my life for the last 25+ years.
Despite all my good intentions to write a great blog for my little business, I’ve been dreadful and kept putting it off until now. This is my fur-st blog post for Art By Tasha (please do fur-give the dog-related puns, but they are my passion and I expect them to appear a lot in my writing, so watch out for them).
Tasha’s Dog Walking / Boarding Rates
Launching a pet portrait business halfway through last year was ideal, but more by luck than anything else. It meant I could offer my hand-drawn pet portraits for people to buy as personal Christmas presents. Mostly, the commissions came from word of mouth. My paw-rents were hugely supportive in letting their global network of fur-ends know about my new venture. This resulted in a spike in commissions and my steepest learning curve. I was building my website and social media audience from scratch, whilst also drawing my little heart out!
At the same time, I kick-started my dog walk and dog boarding business. Deliberately keeping it local, I walk dogs on a one-to-one basis. I also offer a home-from-home dog boarding service. The combination of pet portraits and the dog walking/boarding has allowed me both the healthier lifestyle I wanted as well as the creative outlet I craved. My step count has risen from a sedentary 350steps to in excess of 15k daily. I also feel more deeply rooted in my local community and I’ve built up a lovely pack from my village, of all shapes, sizes and services. They do say hindsight is a great thing, so let me ask you, “Who launches a one-on-one dog walking business in the lead-up to winter in the UK?”. LOL. However, having enjoyed walking the dogs through winter and never regretting my decision, now I can reap the reward as we move into my fur-st spring and summer with the dogs!
Taking the plunge has been harder than I imagined. Not in setting up Art By Tasha and the dog walking but more about closing down and turning my back on recruitment. The administration behind winding it all up was arduous, but I’ve not regretted my decision in the last 11 months at all. A career in recruitment, particularly the headhunting side had changed a lot in my time. Both employer and job seekers’ attitudes, expectations and ambitions, as well as their professionalism, had shifted greatly. It just wasn’t giving me any satisfaction, and ultimately, I’d fallen out of love with it. In creating Art By Tasha, my fallback (or security blanket) is dogwalking and pet sitting… but I want to make drawing pet portraits the biggest part of my life.
Having been in the world of marketers for more than a decade, I know how important content is, in reaching your audience. Creating an engaging blog is important to my website. It’ll be my marketing asset, one that I am in direct control of. So, pivoting to do something I love means I have to consistently publish content about my lovely new little business. It’s taken me nearly a year to do it, but here we are!
If you’ve read this far, I must be doing ok…. Keep going. I’m baring all.
So far, I’ve learned a HUGE amount about drawing. Creating a pet portrait business before Christmas was a baptism by fire. It was obvious to me that having a presence on social media is important. You can find Art By Tasha on Facebook, Instagram and TikTok, a couple of my posts have been really popular but watching the steady growth of an invested audience is my goal. You can help me with this. By engaging with my content (this means liking my posts, sharing them and commenting, all of which really help me beat the social media algorithms. Do check them out as you’ll see me and my pencils creating beautiful portraits of furbabies. At the end of 2025, I drew many Dogs (Labradors, Vizla, Golden Retriever, Cockapoo, Bernese Mountain dogs, Beddlington Whippet crosses, Australian Shepherd and multiple Cats, not to mention a Giraffe thrown in for a challenge. This year’s fur-st commission booked was a portrait of the bride and groom’s own horses as their wedding present (see, pet portraits aren’t just for Christmas!). Good thing I love a challenge, and I particularly enjoy drawing breeds I’ve not drawn before! Bring it on!
So, I’ve been thinking about my customers. Who are they? Well, they’ve all been different. A few have commissioned their own pets’ portraits as a treat for themselves. Though more often, my actual customer is the recipient’s husband or wife, close friend or other family member commissioning a very special gift for their loved one. My pet portraits commissions have been 50th birthday presents, wedding presents, birthday gifts, memorial portraits and many Christmas presents. The customer can also vary from being a father to daughter, from parents to their son, from dear friend to the bride and groom. The common thread in all of my commissions has been that the portrait is an extremely thoughtful gift for someone who is really cared about. I am so lucky to have been sent some videos of the recipients' reactions. Seeing their delight upon revealing their pet’s portrait is wonderfull. I’ve even hand delivered several of the portraits. It’s particularly lovely to see a successful, grown man lost for words, or the tears being held back in Grand-Paw’s eyes, or the excited joy beaming across the face of the young man seeing his best friend’s face on paper. It just confirms how delightful a pet portrait can be as a present.
So now I consider how I’ll be capturing the attention of my customers? Social Media is a start. Seemingly, you all enjoy seeing me (my face as the artist) along with the portraits doing a big reveal. It means I’ve had to be brave and be in front of the camera more (definitely not my favourite place to be!). But it’s all content, whether that’s written - my blogs and social media outreach or my collection of videos and pictures of past commissioned pet portraits. This blog will help, but posting on social media will get me in front of more. And of course referrals. I do offer a friends and family discount, so please make sure to quote who’d referred you so a discount can apply.
I am so thankful to my friends, family, and my family’s friends who helped kick-start Art By Tasha in the run-up to Christmas. Now, almost a year later, I’m ready to open the Christmas commission book again. I wonder what animals this year will bring me? It was both cats and dogs last Christmas, I wonder if I’ll get something more exotic - perhaps a gerbil, lizard, bird or donkey? Who knows?
I welcome your interest and discussions, commence your commission enquiry and allow me to create an exceptional pet portrait for you.
