Dog-Sitting...Like a Boss

Ten years ago, if you had told me that I would one day be the owner of two small businesses, I wouldn't have believed you.

But it's true. I am the owner of two small businesses. They are VERY small businesses--I am the only employee of both these businesses and I've never earned enough from them in a month to jeopardize my Social Security benefits--but they are still businesses, licensed at the state and city levels, official as can be.

c.creativity licences.

I have to say, I'm pretty proud of myself. Owning a business requires the confidence to say, "I have something to offer that is worth paying for." It feels great to have that confidence.

Once upon a time, my anxiety made it difficult for me to show my art to people, but for three years now, I've had some of my photography for sale on the internet. Yeah, my mother may be my biggest customer, but I still collect and pay taxes, have business cards and a wholesaler's permit, and I intend to eventually expand into selling my photography for stock. I operate under registered trade name of c.creativity, which, not so incidentally, is the name of this blog and my Etsy store. I'm branding, people!

The online photo store.

When I first started looking after the Ancient Kitty eight years ago, I never imagined that act would grow into a pet-sitting business. But when I was looking over my earnings from last year and facing the prospect of more clients this year, I realized that my little enterprise had grown beyond its informal roots and ought to be treated with respect. So I applied not only for licenses at the state level and in all the cities where I was currently and might in the future do business, but also purchased pet-sitter's insurance and bonding. Let me tell you, it makes me feel really good to get to say "Licensed, Bonded & Insured" on my business cards! I've made a website for the dog-sitting business, which I've named "Jolly Mutt Dog-Sitting," so prospective and current clients can check out my rates and my testimonials and availability. (I especially love the availability calendar!)

I'm licensed to operate my dog-sitting business in four different cities in the state of Washington.

It's official!

Do you know what else I love? Answering business-related emails. In my day-to-day life, I engage in very few "adult" activities or responsibilities: I don't shop or cook or clean, for example. Pretty much everyone I know would love to have FEWER work-related emails to respond to, but it makes me feel like, well, a boss to be communicating with clients and scheduling services.

The services aspect of dog-sitting hasn't changed, though. The dogs don't care if I'm officially licensed to be providing services in their city of residence, they just want to know if I'm going to play with them!

I did my first overnight with Cutie the Pyrenees a few weeks ago. As a two-year old, she has a lot more rambunctious energy than my elderly clients, but she snoozed more than she played and is a beautiful and friendly animal. I came home with drool all over my clothes and a resolution to teach her a thing or two about leash manners in the future!

Cutie at play...

...and at rest.

She's very affectionate and friendly!

I just finished up back-to-back gigs with Mr. Gorgeous and Sweetheart, which have kept me away from home and my own dear dog for nine days.

The first few days with Mr. Gorgeous were pretty rough because I was having a medication interaction that left me feeling really wiped out. Mr. Gorgeous, however, was in exceptionally fine form, having just been groomed. None of these photos comvey how soft and clean all that fluff was! He was also feeling very lazy, so the fact that I was feeling under the weather didn't disrupt his agenda of sleeping all day in his cozy bed. He was still interested in a game of slo-mo keepaway after dinner, but instead of leading me in a sedate and dignified jog around the house, he settled for "eluding" me at a walking pace. And thus was a good time had by all.

The well-groomed Mr. Gorgeous.

A friend's comment: "It looks like it could be a centerfold in a dog magazine."

Did someone say, "Handsome"?

Sweetheart, by contrast, does not have "sedate" or "dignified" settings, so she seemed to be almost cartoonishly expressive and demonstrative after six days with the extremely mellow Mr. Gorgeous. She watched my every move with interest and enthusastically licked any body part within reach! Forget "kisses": this dog, when happy, will lick hands, arms, your pants, even the top of your head! Oh, and she's pretty much ALWAYS happy. She's such a charming dog and always a pleasure to spend time with.

Sweetheart: "Why be dignified when you can be happy?"

The happy German Shepherd lazing in the sun...

...and chewing on a ball. Life is good!

I think this photograph perfectly captures her sweet personality: she's checking in with me, her eyes full of love and joy, to see what we'll be doing together next.

So that's the latest! I just can't resist announcing that my business is going to the dogs and I couldn't be more pleased. (Dog businesses and organizations rely heavily on puns, so it's only appropriate that I occasionally indulge.) The work may be no different from what I've been doing, but I'm proud to be doing it under the banner of Jolly Mutt Dog-Sitting, Licensed, Bonded & Insured, and not just as little ol' migrainey me.

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Drawing Dogs: A Portrait Process

Kora.

Photography has become my primary mode of creative expression in recent years, but for much of my life, including the period when I was studying art in college, drawing was my preferred medium. Between the migraines and the medications I take to treat them, I have felt that I haven't had the cognitive capacity to answer to the demands of drawing. Photography has been perfect for me because all the effort it requires is for me to be alert in observing the world around me and I am never out of alert mode! So drawing has fallen by the wayside.

But then one of the foster parents for a dog rescue I follow on Facebook started up a project of drawing a dog every single day. Apparently, she, too, had once studied art with a focus on drawing, but had put it aside in recent years. I was so delighted and inspired by the drawings she posts daily on her blog, dogadayart.wordpress.com, that I had to start sketching dogs, too. I don't draw one a day, since my intellectual and creative faculties are not always equal to the task, but I've really enjoyed getting back into drawing. Most of the drawings are small sketches of the dogs I dog-sit, some from photographs and some from life. I've been working a lot in pencil, which is more forgiving than ink, my previous preferred drawing method. I've been posting the dog drawings on my photography Facebook page and they've been a huge hit, so much so that my sister asked if I'd be willing to make a large, custom portrait of her friends' dog for a gift. I agreed and received a photograph of their sweet mutt, Kora, and got to work. I documented my progress because I always like seeing images of works as they progress and thought readers of this blog might enjoy seeing the process.

Sweetheart sketches.

Until I began this portrait, all of my drawings had been made in a 5.5x8.5" sketchbook, so they were, by necessity, rather small. I realized, when I confronted my smooth expanse of 90 lb. vellum paper, that creating a 8x10 image would be too difficult for me to scale accurately in a freehand fashion. My drawing skills were returning as I had made more and more sketches, but I still wasn't up to whipping out a larger scale drawing, especially one that needed to be a realistic likeness, without some assistance. So I took the photo of Kora, pasted it into a Pages (the Mac program) document, enlarged it to 8x10, and drew a 1x1" grid over the image. I then used a ruler and placed a small, faint dot at where each intersection would be on the paper. I then went square by square, lightly sketching in the outlines of the dog's main features and markings. When I was finished, I had a properly proportioned guide of faint lines ready to be filled and transformed.

The original photo with the grid.

The faint outline ensures that my drawing
will be properly proportioned for a realistic look.

For the bulk of the drawing, I used a relatively soft 4B graphite pencil sharpened to a fine point. I am right-handed, so I started in the upper left edge of the image, working my way down and across so that I wouldn't drag my hand through the soft graphite, which will smudge. The smudges are erasable, but the less you have to clean up, the better!

And so it begins!

To make the drawing, I opened the photo without the grid on my computer and expanded it so that it filled my entire screen. I then sat down in my easy chair, some ten feet away, put my cousin's new album on (Jameson & Co.'s "Out of the Canyon on Crutches"), and went to work, typically two hours at a time, which was as much work as my brain and eyes could handle.

The left eye emerges.

One of the ways in which drawing differs from photography is that there are so many different ways to go about it. You can draw realistically or choose a more loosely evocative style. You can make an image extremely detailed or minimally detailed. You have to decide how you will convey textures, colors, and shadows. It made me laugh when a Facebook commenter referenced Magritte's famous "The Treachery of Images" when I posted one of my collie sketches because I'd already been thinking about how, unlike when you photograph something, when you draw it, you are always making an interpretation, a translation of the object. I choose to point my camera in such a way that it shows people things that they don't necessarily see themselves, but everything I photograph is there, in the present, completely real. When I make a drawing, even if the end result is recognizable, it must come THROUGH me.

The left half of the face has been sketched in!

Drawing in a realistic fashion is not something I ever spent much time doing, even when I was drawing a great deal. I was interested in the emotionally evocative power of inked lines, so this way of drawing was new to me. So I thought back to my days of Life Drawing class in college (that's drawing humans from nude models, for those of you who weren't art students) and decided the best way to create a realistic look without messing it up was to draw the light and dark areas. You see, if you try to draw an eye, for example, you will end up drawing your idea of an eye, and chances are, your idea of an eye is not going to look right at all. If you want to draw an eye that looks like an eye and feels like an eye, you are best off drawing the curves, the shadows, the light, the dark, making yourself blind, as it were, to what the thing is, focusing instead on what is there. Part of why I seated myself at a distance from the computer screen displaying the image as I worked was because at a distance, I could more easily shift my focus to see not a dog with eyes and ears and charming spectacle markings, but an abstract form of shapes and shades.

We have a right eye!

Once I had drawn the entire face with the 4B pencil, I used an even blacker and softer 8B pencil to increased the blackness of the dark areas around the eyes and nose. I also smudged gentle layers of the soft 8B graphite over various parts of the fur and features to increase the depth and dimension of the figure.

Dark details have been added; it is now time to start erasing and refining!
You can see some of my fingerprints about the right ear.

I spent a great deal of time fine-tuning the piece, trying to get exactly the right balance of dark to light. I must confess that the right side of the face gave me a great deal of trouble: I erased and redrew it several times trying to get the highlights of the white fur near the eye just right! Ultimately, deciding when to stop working was one of the hardest parts of the process. It's tempting for a perfectionist to simply refine and refine and refine without committing to a final version.

This detail allows you to see the layers of cross-hatching and smudging and erasing that went into giving the muzzle its appearance of three dimensions.

A detail of the work around the eye.

I ended up being extremely pleased with the final result. As I said, I'd never attempted something exactly like this before and was rather impressed by how well it turned out! The many short pencil strokes I'd used for the base layer of the fur on her ears and forehead ended up working perfectly to capture the velvet texture of her fur and my concerted effort to capture the shapes of the light and dark areas on her face paid off as far as giving her muzzle a beautiful, natural, three-dimensional feeling. I'm pleased to report that Kora's owners have received this drawing and love it! I'll still be working on informal sketches, but it looks like there will be more formal dog portraits in my future. Thanks, Laurelin at A Dog A Day, for bringing drawing back into my life!

The finished portrait of Kora.

Interested in commissioning a dog portrait? 

You can contact me through my artist's Facebook page.

Visit my Etsy photo store at www.ccreativity.etsy.com!

Sunny Days in May: Dog-Sitting and Flower-Photographing

A sweet old girl.

Splash! Lady goes swimming.

I spent this weekend looking after a new client, a golden retriever that I'll call Lady. She's the quintessential golden: sweet, mellow, and friendly. She's thirteen years old, and while she's got some arthritis, an active lifestyle keeps her joints moving relatively freely and she's still got plenty of spunk!

This active routine calls for a nightly walk to the park where I first met her and her owner while I was walking Mr. Gorgeous, where she plays fetch for roughly twenty minutes, and then walks back to her house, a little more than a mile away. I failed to replicate this routine for her, but not for lack of trying!

On the first evening, we arrived at the park to discover the presence of two policemen AND an animal control officer with a pup paddy wagon! It appeared they'd been called regarding a specific incident, since they spent the entire time speaking to an individual who had a barking dog in his car, but I was not about to let Lady off-leash in front of an animal control officer! The park is treated by the locals as an unofficial off-leash park, but there are prominently posted signs to remind park-goers that letting your dog off-leash is against the law. It would be terrible to have your client's dog hauled away because you were dumb enough to let it off-leash in front of law enforcement! But I am not dumb and neither were the many individuals who arrived with their dogs, observed the situation with dismay, and then left. Lady and I took a meandering walk around the perimeter of the park, stopping for petting sessions, trying to kill time in hopes that the cops would leave and I could give Lady her ball game. They eventually left, but the animal control officer didn't, and finally I gave up and walked Lady home. She thought it was a rather lame walk and I was very sorry that I couldn't explain to her why there could be no game of fetch that evening!

 

A (non)retriever and her ball.

Things looked more promising the next evening. When we arrived at the park, there were no problematic legal impediments to our pleasure, so I let her off her leash and threw the ball for her. Well, she moseyed after it and then lay down and rolled around on her back on top of it, but she didn't return it to me. I threw it again, she slowly trotted after it, and then stood with the ball in her mouth, surveying the scene. On the next throw, she settled herself in the grass to enjoy the breeze. Her owner said that she's great about bringing the ball and dropping it without any fuss, but Lady displayed no interest in playing fetch with me! So finally I gave up and sat down on the grass with her and gave her a nice petting session, which she enjoyed, pressing her head against my chest as she leaned into the rub-down. It was very pleasant at the park, but not exactly what had been prescribed! I then walked her around the park to see if I could get her juices flowing, and while she displayed so much enthusiasm upon seeing a man hitting balls at one of the tennis courts that he offered to give me one for my dog, she expressed zero interest in returning her ball when I tried tossing it for her again immediately afterward! So I gave up and we walked down to the marina and admired the high schoolers all dressed up for prom instead.

A sopping Lady post-swim with her toy in mouth.

On Day Three, I decided to try something different. Lady's owner mentioned that she loved to swim and that it was great for her arthritis, so I decided that we'd make an excursion to the secluded little lakeside park where I take my own dog swimming. It was sunny and 80 degrees, a perfect day for a swim, and Lady got extremely excited when I got one of her float toys out of her toy box! She insisted on carrying it herself out to the car and then down to the lake. In her enthusiasm to get to the water's edge, she nearly pulled me off my feet as we scrambled down the steep slope! (She's not exactly a loose-leash walker and can exert plenty of pull even on level ground.) We had the little park all to ourselves and it was very fun to chuck her toy for her out into the lake. Unlike with the ball, Lady had no problem retrieving her floating toy for me! It was such a nice thing to do on a hot May day. I had been wondering how much swimming would be enough, but I needn't have worried: Lady told me she was done by trotting away back up the trail, toy in mouth, at such a rapid pace that I had trouble catching up to her to get her leash on! We met two dogs and their families coming down the hill as we went up it, so we certainly weren't the only denizens of Seattle who were charmed by the idea of spending part of a sunny Sunday by the lake. I took Lady for a brief walk in the hot sunshine in an attempt to get her somewhat drier before putting her back in my car and then it was back home to bask out on the backyard grass.

A playful Lady rolling around on top one of her toys to get a good back-scratching!

Snoozing on her bed.

Except for our seeming inability to play a decent game of dry-land fetch, Lady and I got along just fine. She liked my massages and being brushed and grinned most gratifyingly when I returned to the house and got up in the morning. She could usually be found in my vicinity, including waiting patiently outside the bathroom door while I showered, and on one occasion, dropped her ball in one of my bags in the bedroom. I think it can safely be said that she found me an acceptable substitute for her owner in her owner's absence.

Lady in profile.

There were two things that went slightly awry during this dog-sitting gig. The first involved sleeping. It's never easy, especially the first night, to sleep in a new place. I had a terrible time falling asleep the first evening and then dreamed that I continued to be awake for sometime after I dropped off, and dreaming you're unable to sleep is not generally very restful! So after a poor beginning to my night's slumber, I found myself awakened when dawn came and started to fill the bedroom with light. It was a very nice bedroom, but it had an entire wall of east-facing windows, so on a sunny May day, even with the mini-blinds closed, it was flooded with light from about 4:30 onward. I have difficulty sleeping unless a room is pitch-black and have special "black out" blinds on my bedroom window to prevent any light from entering. I also need a lot of sleep in able to function properly. Between falling asleep after sometime after 1:00 and sleeping fitfully until 3:00 and then being awoken by the light at 4:30 and sleeping only fitfully until I finally gave up and got up around 8:30, I was a wreck! My mother was kind enough to buy me a sleep mask while I was at my acupuncture appointment, which fortunately worked wonderfully the next night, but Saturday was not an easy day. I nearly broke down when it came time to take Lady on her walk: the enormity of that mile-long walk with a large, pulling dog to the park and then the uphill walk home again just seemed too much. I was able to give myself a little pep talk about not trying to do too much and so, after eating an enormous bowl of granola for dinner and taking my migraine medication, I drove to the park with Lady and left my large, heavy, fancy-pants camera at home. (I was sorry I didn't have it because one of the park's resident bald eagles was sitting in the PERFECT place to get an amazing picture; I seldom go to that park without seeing one of the eagles, but it was the first time I'd seen one of them so perfectly situated in regard to unimpeded sight lines and not hopelessly silhouetted against the light!) In the end, I did have a nice time and while Lady didn't get quite as long of a walk, she did get some exercise.

The other thing that didn't go quite right was that I couldn't get the kitchen sink to turn on. I'm pretty sure this was not my fault. Lady's owner left me a note that the sink's garbage disposal wasn't working and I suspect that the water had been turned off somehow while she was poking around with the disposal. At least that's what I hope. It didn't SEEM like a difficult-to-operate sink, but I sure wasn't able to get any water to come out of it! That kind of thing will certainly make you feel idiotic and paranoid, though. I ended up washing the dishes that couldn't be put in the dishwasher in the bathtub!

Of course, one of my favorite things about dog-sitting (other than the dog) is getting to take my camera for a walk in a new place. Since it was sunny all three days that I dog-sat, I was able to get more than two hundred beautiful photos of late-spring flowers. The following are some of my favorites in rainbow order:

Peony.

Ranunculus.
To view a whole album's worth of ranunculus photos, click here.

Euphorbia.

Bluebells.
(This is probably my favorite photo out of all the ones I took!)

Bearded Iris.

Rhododendron.

Spirea.

You can see more photos from this outing (and early spring photo sessions) in this Facebook album. (You don't need to be a member of Facebook to view the photos, by the way!)

That concludes my extended rundown of my first (and hopefully not last!) weekend with lovely old Lady!

The Evolution of Mouse in a Digital Era

Poor Mouse.

From November of 2007 to July of 2011, I was all about Mouse. I took thousands of photographs of him, he got to travel with me to California and Arizona, I started selling the photos, I wrote a children's book featuring him that I actually sent off to a publisher (it was rejected), I was working on a second children's book, and then I got that darn concussion last summer. Since then, things just haven't been the same.

"What happened?" Mouse wonders.

Part of it is directly related to the concussion and my ability to work on a complex project. I haven't had the energy and mental agility to research publishers and agents and to track down the final props for the alphabet book photos. Other factors have included Etsy's switch from displaying search results according to recency to results according to relevancy in August of 2011. Before the switch, as long as I renewed a listing every day, my photos came up high in the results. With the new search, the keywords that you use to "tag" your listings matter most and I have yet to figure out how to attract shoppers the way I used to. According to my stats, the drop-off isn't too severe, but before the switch, I was included in an average of 15 treasuries every month. Now, the number is closer to three.

So cold and alone...

Mouse has also been the victim of the success of my macro photo shop. I had just started taking mouse-free photos prior to the concussion and that's what I've focused on since. Items from my macro shop have been featured in an average of 55 treasuries a month. It receives five times the number of visitors and eight times more listings marked as favorites. It's much more rewarding, especially since I have only a very limited amount of time to devote to activities like making listings, to expend my energy on projects related to my non-mouse photography.

Also, Mouse and my new camera don't really mix. My fabulous 100mm macro lens has a very shallow depth of field--too small to contain more than a fraction of Mouse! That means if his eyes are in focus (which is most critical), his nose and his ears are just barely in range and the rest of his body, much less whatever he's posing with, is out of focus. This isn't so much of a problem with the 18-55mm lens that came with the camera, but I find that lens virtually useless for anything else, so I seldom have it on the camera unless I have a specific project for it. And Mouse is pretty banged up from twenty years of life, much of it spent as a plaything, something that is maybe a little TOO clear when captured in all those megapixels!

The eye on the right is in focus in this photo, but that means the eye on the left is out of focus!

Mouse's face is in focus in this image, but the tiny flowers he's posing with are not.

Poor battered little dude.

But there's something else. I have to confess, I've gotten bored of Mouse.

Have you ever had the experience where you've repeated an ordinary word over and over and over to yourself until it has come to seem totally absurd? That's how I've started feeling about Mouse. He just seems weird. I find myself unable to fathom why anyone WOULD want a picture with a mouse in it and that makes it very hard to promote him when I've lost faith in his appeal! I still love the idea of him as a children's book character, but the whole art thing has seemed increasingly bizarre. I am disenchanted with Mouse.

"What!?! But I'm so charming!"

But there is good news for Mouse fans (of which there are, thankfully, many among my acquaintance!) because this last week, I suddenly had a resurgence of interest in my little wooden friend.

Now, I've never gotten into Twitter because I've felt like it would be redundant--I'd be posting the same updates as I have on my photography Facebook page except without the benefit of being able to upload all the photos. I try to conserve my energy and having a c.creativity Facebook account AND a Twitter account didn't seem worth it. But then my mother was asking me if I'd ever considered being on Twitter and for some reason, it suddenly occurred to me that MOUSE could be on Twitter and that idea appealed to me immensely! It's bugged me that you can only connect your Facebook page to one of your shops on Etsy and I have it linked to my macro store, since that's where most of the action is. But if Mouse could have his own social media platform... I liked the sound of that!

"Sweet!"

So now Mouse has a Twitter account! The idea behind it is that he's tweeting from his perspective and I hope, over time, to develop a sort of voice for him. It's completely reawakened my interest in Mouse. I've started taking photos of him specifically so they can go up on Twitter and when I'm awake at night, instead of thinking of Words I Like (what, you don't spend your hours of insomnia creating mental lists of words you find appealing?), I've started coming up with ideas for tweets! I've always thought Mouse had a lot of personality for such a simple object, so I'll work on developing it now through a new medium, though I hope it will also rekindle my desire to spruce up his Etsy shop. Mouse, of course, is very pleased to be getting attention again and hopes to see you on Twitter!

Follow Mouse on Twitter

www.ccreativity.etsy.com - www.silvermouse.etsy.com

www.facebook.com/ccreativityphotography

Recent Creativity in Review

Between the weather, messing around with horses, and walking and taking care of Mr. Gorgeous, I haven't had much energy as of late to devote to my Etsy stores. I've been tweaking my tags as items come up for renewal, but since the start of February, I've only listed six new items! As usual, I have a tremendous backlog of items that I want to list, but my mind has to be really sharp in order for me to write the listings themselves.

I have been up to a few other creative endeavors, though.

I've been doing a little bit of drawing lately, like this portrait of my dog...

...I developed this custom trio for a customer looking for game room decor...

...and this secret project (it's going to be a gift for someone) has been taking up a lot of my time.

I've also made a couple of Etsy treasuries.

This one is devoted to bowling.

This one is devoted to buckles.

But listing-wise, this is it:

8x10 Lilacs and Mouse

8x10 Amethyst

8x10 Wooden Chess Pieces

8x10 Red Tulips

16x20 Yellow Daffodil

11x14 Blue Marbles

I hope to get more listings up soon, but until my horsemanship class ends in a couple of weeks, I probably won't have the energy to devote to writing those listings. In the meantime, you can always check out my albums on my c.creativity Facebook page, particularly the Macro: Natural album where many of those yet-to-be-listed photos can be found!

www.ccreativity.etsy.com - www.silvermouse.etsy.com

www.facebook.com/ccreativityphotography