I have been an artist since I was a small child, multi-passionate creative, designer, and dreamer, looking to share everything with you.
I sold my first Siberian Husky animal drawing when was 13 years old. A few years later, I met an artist and friend who then introduced me to acrylic paint: I started selling on commission from that point on.
Now, I work primarily with oils and acrylic inks. These are my preferred mediums because I have a little more control in blending the values evenly through each other.
It’s feeling and emotion that strike my interest and pulls me into my subjects and how I see them. I love giving the observer freedom to identify with it personally. My desire is to give each piece its own individuality as though it has a story to tell.
With the excitement of a new piece, I find a canvas a little larger than the image in mind. Using a fairly thin brush, like a #2 Artisan, I paint the underneath shapes with my darkest values. Next, I use a two color mixture of French ultramarine blue and burnt sienna. Starting off center of the canvas, I draw with a streamline flow securely guiding the brush. This creates my foundation. I can always go back and change it if I like. There are no mistakes because the more I work with the shapes and values, the more in depth it appears.
During this stage of the piece, it starts taking form and develops to the next level of the process. The freedom of color has everything tc do with the mood of the piece and the feelings it represents. I find the best colors for drama are cadmiums’ red and yellow against Lamp black and and deep blue.
I do not lay down one color and then another while working from dark to light, like most trained artist do. Rather, I build section by section meshing all of my values together, as if digging into the piece and oulling it outward so to speak until it all ties together. As I do this, I am turning the canvas every which way until all of the dimensions line up. It helps me to see nto my subjects even deeper, allowing me to see thi full scope of the picture.
Another technique in this process is not to look directly at the spot I’m workins on, but just above it. This gives me a more extensive view of the subject at hand.
I never know the time frame of a piece until it unearths itself. However, I do know what the outcome will look like before I begin. Clean edges help bigtime in making the painting seem real, almost as if it were seperate from the canvas.
As with anything, the whole process of art is about balance, being careful not to over or under do a painting for a happy client; but rather working with it until I know there is nothing more that I can do to make it any better for them.
I find that the hardest part of a painting though, is signing the picture, because art is a continual learning process and so I never feel as if I am finished.