Winner of Pet Portrait by ShawnaLee announced from DAWS Annual Ball 2015.

Congratulations to Meagan Schmidt for winning the annual DAWS Ball Gift Certificate for 2015!

Meagan and Ernie Schmidt, residents of Danbury for 16 years, attended the Danbury Animal Welfare Society’s annual DAWS BALL fundraiser at the Amber Room Colonade, and came away with a beautiful portrait of their two dogs, Daisy and Rosie, hand rendered in Graphite by ShawnaLee from photographs that were supplied.

“Thank you again for the beautiful portrait...we love it. And of course thank you for supporting DAWS!!

We adopted Rosie and Daisy through Petfinder because we fell in love with American Foxhounds and knew we wanted two. We had adopted our first foxhound, Gilda, in 2001 and when she died, we tried to fill our broken hearts with two dogs!

They both were rescued and fostered by wonderful, brave souls and then drove our girls separately to the northeast from different areas of North Carolina. We adopted Rosie from a foster home in Windsor, CT. We think she was about 2 when we adopted her on January 31st, 2010.

We had hoped to adopt both dogs at the same time but Daisy, who was still being fostered in North Carolina, had to wait as there was a storm that prevented them from driving up the coast. We picked her up a few hours following her arrival in Manalapan, New Jersey. She was stressed and exhausted but fell asleep in the car. Daisy was about a year old. A fun fact is that she has a marking on her side that looks like a heart, and we picked her up on Valentine’s Day!

They got along pretty much immediately and love the same things...long walks and chasing squirrels especially. Still, they have their own personalities and make a point of making us laugh every single day. What a gift these two are.” Meagan and Ernie Schmidt

Both rescues, Daisy and Rosie are inseparable. As any dog owner knows, each one is uniquely very different from the other! ShawnaLee intuitively captured that personality difference in the portrait.

Daisy is very eager and high energy in everything she does, while Rosie is very mellow and patient.

The Gift Certificate was donated to the DAWS Ball annual fundraising event by Portraits by ShawnaLee.

ShawnaLee is a Middlebury, Ct Portrait artist currently working in Graphite, Charcoal, and Oils. She is a member of the Richter Association for the arts and the Connecticut Society of Portrait Artists and has recently joined the Nutmeg Collective in Ct.

ShawnaLee is the artist of the DAWS Greeting room Mural, and recently won an award for her portrait of Gabriella.

For over 40 years, Danbury Animal Welfare Society (DAWS) has been dedicated to improving the lives of animals in our community and beyond. Since 1974 DAWS has been promoting responsible pet guardianship and the humane treatment of animals, while working toward ending animal overpopulation through education and a variety of programs.

For more information regarding Pet Portraiture by ShawnaLee, please visit:

Facebook: Portraits by ShawnaLee

artist@shawnalee.com

www.shawnalee.com

For more information about DAWS visit:

http://www.daws.org/