Friday, March 29, 2024
cat photographsdaily photofoster catsMariposa

Daily Photo: All Work and No Play

tabby and white at keyboard
Skeptical Mariposa

Sure, Mariposa, my eyes kind of glaze over at the keyboard too.

So I’m going to toss some last-minute things at you and hope for the best. Instead of finishing and sharing my new holiday artwork*, and having fun posting cute cat pictures and holiday deals for all of you over the past couple of weeks, I had the joy of rebuilding my galleries on www.PortraitsOfAnimals.net and rebuilding my databases here on The Creative Cat. Thank goodness for gracious kitties who provided lots and lots of purrs and encouragement, even hanging out with me all night at my desk. Everyone is well and active and happy, despite the additional hassle of water in the basement…another time consuming activity…

You may have noticed this site was down several times this month. Since I started publishing in 2009 I’ve posted a lot…a lot of posts and even more images. It’s been growing ever since and thousands of images and posts need to be stored on a server somewhere. I need to reduce those numbers on the server, which I’ve done over the years by removing duplicate images, but even if I do that again and again I just keep adding more! So I need more storage space. I will have to move this site to an individual server, which is fine. I’m hoping to wait until January at least for that. And hopefully I’ll be able to keep things going in the process.

Some updates and stuff

On Portraits of Animals the plugin that creates the galleries of art and products on each page finally just stopped doing it. Not good if people show up to look at cat art and there’s nothing there. I had been searching for a similar way to display the galleries and that was actually difficult to find one that displayed my artwork well that didn’t have some conflicts with…whatever.

The Creative Cat is the main referrer to Portraits of Animals—most of the people who go there to shop get there from links on this site. Having them both down with the holidays approaching I had to put all my plans to entice you to shop on hold and work on both sites at the same time, and that was when I ran out of time for posting here at all. I even cut back on Instagram, so I wasn’t posting much of anywhere.

I actually did find a gallery that displays my art and merchandise that I like better than the one I had! The old one was a square thumbnail that showed the top of something and cut off the rest. The new one shows the whole image, so scrolling down a page of art or photography or garden flags or votives you can see the whole thing, and I like that much better.

This has been coming, I was hoping it could hold out through the holiday season until January when I actually have the time to make all these changes. The result is that I’ve had practically no sales since October when the galleries really failed, there were no vendor shows I could hop into, and my open houses have not been well-attended the past few times so I couldn’t rely on that.

Creating and selling art and merchandise is a necessary part of my income, and if missing would make things quite difficult with even everyday expenses, let alone things like Mr. Sunshine’s continued testing and hoping to get those dentals done sometime soon.

Luckily, I was able to sell merchandise at a discount to HCMT as gifts for volunteers, and I am so grateful for that—it’s not as much as I’d earn selling at full price, but it was really easy to make several dozen custom ornaments and pack everything up and receive a lump sum, then get back to work.

Catching up

thumbnail for custom pet memorial votives video
A video for Custom Pet Memorial Votives

I did manage to make two little videos about my commissioned portraits and Custom Pet Memorial Votives which I’ve been wanting to do for a long time and had planned to have them done in October in time to promote both as gifts for the holidays and hoped that would generate income in place of the non-existent sales. Well, there’s no time like the present! I’m going to share each of them here in two different posts so you can see them and they are part of the archive. I can’t paint any portraits or create any votives or other custom items before Christmas, but you can buy gift certificates, and sometimes that’s a better idea for some recipients.

*And I don’t care if it’s less than a week until Christmas, I am finishing my Christmas artwork this year! You may not see it until Christmas Eve, but I’ve been so looking forward to these two paintings that I’m going to enjoy them after all this time at the computer.


Gifts featuring cats you know! Visit Portraits of Animals

AfterDinnerNap-Etsy

Fine Art • Photography • Gifts • Greeting Cards • Books • Commissioned Portraits & Artwork



Copyright

All images and text used on this site are copyrighted to Bernadette E. Kazmarski unless otherwise noted and may not be used without my written permission, although links to your site are more than welcome and are shared. Please ask if you are interested in using and image or story in a print or internet publication. If you are interested in purchasing a print of an image or a product including it, check my animal and nature website Portraits of Animals to see if I have it available already. If you don’t find it there, visit Ordering Custom Artwork for more information on a custom greeting card, print or other item.


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© 2022 | www.TheCreativeCat.net | Published by Bernadette E. Kazmarski

Weekly schedule of features:

Sunday: Essays, Pet Loss, Poetry, The Artist’s Life

Monday: Adoptable Cats, TNR & Shelters

Tuesday: Rescue Stories

Wednesday: Commissioned Portrait or Featured Artwork

Thursday: New Merchandise

Friday: Book Review, Health and Welfare, Advocacy

Saturday: Your Backyard Wildlife Habitat, Living Green With Pets, Creating With Cats

And sometimes, I just throw my hands in the air and have fun!

 
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Bernadette

From health and welfare to rescue and adoption stories, advocacy and art, factual articles and fictional stories, "The Creative Cat" offers both visual and verbal education and entertainment about cats for people who love cats, pets and animals of all species.

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