Tamara’s talent for creating art was recognized by her family at a very young age. Her mother notes that she started drawing beautiful renditions of roses and other flowers at 4 years old. Artistic ability does run in her family since Tamara is a direct descendent of famous 19th century landscape painter Jean-François Millet. As she grew older her passion for creating paintings of animals of all types became apparent. She experimented with graphite, pen and ink, pastels, and watercolor paint. By high school, Tamara’s chosen media was watercolor and gouache. While in high school, she developed her own successful small business creating watercolor custom pet portraits.

Tamara also enjoyed academics and the sciences. When attending college, her major was biology with a minor in chemistry. Although she maintained a high GPA throughout college, ultimately she followed her true passion for art and developed her own art studio business.

The Tamara Burnett Studio was founded in the late 1990’s. Soon Tamara was fully booked for custom portraiture. She developed a successful technique using acrylic paint at this time. It was not long before her wildlife, dog, and cat watercolor and acrylic paintings were exhibited by the original Cottage Shop Gallery in Placerville, CA. Here her artworks hung alongside paintings by artist Thomas Kincaid. Later, Tamara was accepted into the Wild Wings Art Gallery of Lake City, Minnesota.

A few years later Tamara was commissioned by the Danbury Mint to create original paintings which adorn their 8 collector plate series of Papillons and 4 collector plate series of dachshunds. Soon she pursued licensing her artwork with several companies. Historically, Tamara has worked with many corporations who have used her artwork to decorate their many gift products. Presently, she is licensed with Pet Gifts USA who have licensed several thousand of her images depicting many breeds of dogs, cats, small pets, and wild birds. These gift items have been sold all over the globe.

Tamara continues to provide art for licensing while maintaining a thriving custom portraiture business. This year Tamara plans to develop a series of large acrylic fine art paintings of wildlife, wild birds, and dogs. These will be posted as they are created so be sure to check back in!