About the Artist: Emma Yount
Emma has always had a passion for drawing and painting animals. As a young child she loved to fill up pages of her notebooks with doodles of dogs, cats, birds, and other animals. Since then, her love for the arts has continued to grow. "In high school I got very invested in the studio arts programs at my school. During this time I developed my technical skills, discovered a strong sense of my individual style, and learned to work with color."
Her story: My high school Art teacher introduced me to a paper called YUPO paper. Yupo is 100% recyclable, waterproof, tree-free Synthetic Paper. I found the way the paper reacts to watercolor paint worked well with my artistic style. One day during the summer going into my junior year, I decided to do some painting on my Yupo paper. I searched around my room for some inspiration and came across a photo of my dog. I decided I would try and paint it. After I finished I showed my mom, who told me, “You should try selling those, I bet people would love to buy paintings of their pets!” For once I decided to actually take the advice my mom had given me, and I have been painting pet portraits ever since.
6 years to now, Emma has completed over 500 commissioned portraits and recently expanded to taking pet portrait orders internationally.
About ERY Portraits
About ERY Portraits
ERY Portraits is a small business that began with selling custom-painted, animal portraits to the faculty, administration and students of Wheaton College, MA. It is now open to the general public, with Emma Yount as the head of communications and the artist of the portraits and Alex Case as the graphic and website designer. The paintings are made out of a combination of watercolor, acrylic gouache, and gel pens on Yupo paper.
Mission statement
The goal of ERY Portraits is to produce and share beautiful artwork for customers, and to support other great causes that make the world better, through donating about 10% of our profits.
Social Mission: 4-P Impact
To fulfill our social mission, we’ve adopted a 4-P impact approach. This is a business model that provides value to more than just their customers. Our model is broken down below:
P-rofit : By purchasing a painting you are supporting a young college age artist, along with a few of her college age peers turned employees.
P-eople : I am not satisfied until you are 100% happy with the outcome! I will personally communicate and work with you until the piece is “perfect.”
P-lace : I try to work with my local community as much as I can. I give advice to other young artists at my college, and also give back to my hometown public school system by sharing paintings and monetary donations.
P-lanet : I try to reduce my carbon footprint as much as possible. During the shipping process, most materials are recycled. Even the paper I create my paintings on are made from recycled plastic!
Giving Back
Here are some donations we’ve made to non-profit organizations in the past!
2021- $500 to the jaguares en la Selva environmental Conservation Organization
2020 - $300 to the WIRES foundation
2019 - $250 to the Guiding Eyes for the Blind Foundation
2019 - $250 to the Northampton Education Foundation
If you have any questions fill out a customer feedback form on our contact page or send an email to: eyount99@gmail.com