As an artist, Mel Cairns strives to create unique and imaginative art pieces every day.

Mel is an award winning pet portrait artist in Buckinghamshire. She creates pen and ink sketches with quotes to bring us inspiration and motivation every day. Her style is fast and loose to capture the character of her fluffy models.

Mel began her career as a couturier before gaining secretarial experience at a film studio. While working for the legal team, she pursued a non-traditional part-time route to legal qualification, qualifying as a solicitor 10 years later. She now practises law in house in the entertainment industry.

She lives locally with her husband and two Norwegian Forest cats. During the 2020 pandemic lockdown, Axel (one of their Norwegian Forest cats) escaped from their garden and was killed on the road by their house, leaving them with Saffy and Argyle. On top of the challenges of a busy job for a Hollywood studio’s London-based business, Axel’s death really impacted Mel’s well-being. Her personal mechanism to balance the stress of work is to create. She dusted down her sewing machine and used her lunch break each day to decompress by sewing scrubs for a charity. This reignited her creative curiosity, so she took some time out from her professional career to rest and recuperate from March to May 2021. To feel a sense of achievement, she doodled her cats in ink every day and added motivational quotes. This turned out to be the perfect therapy, and after posting each day on Instagram, Mel has a loyal and growing number of followers on Instagram, Facebook and TikTok under the handle @i.am.melc.

In December 2022, Mel published a collection of her cat and dog illustrations in a beautiful hard back gifting book, ‘Cats & Quotes & Other Furry Friends’. She continues to draw inky ‘fast & loose’ pawtraits every day, takes commissions, and hosts local workshops in High Wycombe themed ‘Draw a Cat with Mel’. Mel has most recently exhibited at Obsidian Art in Stoke Mandeville for Bucks Art Weeks and took part in Thame Art Crawl 2024.

Mel’s work will be displayed at Sally Evans Artists & Makers Fair, hosted in the Thame Town Hall Upper Chamber OX9 3DP  on Friday 17th and Saturday 18th October.