I am conflicted on how to categorize my paintings of animals. Many are created as portraits but should they really be listed with my human portraits in my gallery? I know that many of you do this but I wonder if we shouldn’t have a category called “Pet Portraits”?
I dont mix animals and persons. On my website i have the categories “cats”, “dogs”, “predators”… Etc… And on the dailypaintwork gallery only “animals”. For me it doesnt matter if it is an animal faceportrait or a full body. I dont mix it up with humans. (sorry my english is not perfect) 
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Vana, I see what you mean - if you filter a portrait category there are portraits of both - humans and animals.
I too put animals (portrait or not) in animal category.
It’s funny I looked in portraits and there are all sorts of non-human creatures out there, even a dragonfly. 
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When I posted my work on DPW - and it was almost always paintings of dogs - I put them in “animals” on the basis that this is the category possible buyers would use who liked paintings of dogs, whether they were portraits or not. I assumed that the categories were there to assist buyers to find subjects they like.
Personally I would not like a pet portrait category - but I am currently not trying to sell in DPW so my opinion can safely be ignored!
This is because it is a very particular and limited market which is over-supplied with artists. Also, people may look for paintings of animals that they do not self-describe as pets. Sheep, for example. Horses. Parrots. Chickens. These are examples of animals I have been asked to paint but which the buyer did not describe as “pets”.
I don’t know why anyone would put a dragonfly in the category of portraits. It must make it less likely to sell. Perhaps it was a mistake.
Happy New Year!
Have you found any better places to sell? I love DPW but I’m not selling much. Of course, I don’t post often enough so that means I don’t go on the front page much and that is what really helps.
No, I have just stopped trying to sell for a bit because the effort and worry of trying to sell was eating up more time and energy than trying to paint better. I miss DPW but it is good to have a break from the treadmill of generating material to post and concentrating on painting. DPW isn’t practical for me if I want to paint bigger, either, because the buyers are in the US and I am in the U.K. so the shipping costs are too high. I might come back one day - never say never! I did manage to sell a bit on both eBay and Artfinder but disliked both sites which are expensive and not artist friendly like DPW. My sales now are word of mouth and nearly as rare as unicorns 
I’m new to DPW and this forum is one of the reasons I joined. Plus it’s fun looking at the paintings others are doing as they are posted each day. I’ve only had luck selling word of mouth, via my newsletter and at a couple of shows I do a year. I’m an animal portrait artist and am using the animal designation as I build my gallery. I will be closing my current Artsala website and just using DPW soon.
you could assign pets as a keyword in the art tracking, a search will give about 2500 works where animals gives over 25000