Artist's Drawing & Inspiration
I Just Love to Paint
From coloured pencils to acrylics, there’s no stopping this motivated artist.
Ihave always had a passion for drawing and was always my favourite subject in school. My family migrated by ship to Australia from Holland when I was 8 years old and on the trip over I was always found colouring in pictures with either colour pencils or crayons while other children were out on the decks playing games or out on the swings.
After completing high school at
All Hallows School in Brisbane, I attended the art school at the Institute of Technology in George St Brisbane, which is now part of the Griffith University. Here I completed a four year course with a Diploma in Commercial Illustration. This is where I found painting was my real passion, though I was advised no money could be made out of painting, so I pursued into a
Graphic Art career whilst my young family was growing up.
Now with my children grown up with families of their own, I moved to the Sunshine Coast where I discovered there was no further demand for older artists in the Graphic Art field, and was struggling to get work after moving from Brisbane. Younger artists had always obtained first preference with every interview obtained.
I approached Bloomhill Cancer Help at Buderim on the Sunshine Coast for some volunteer work. They are a non-profit organisation, who help people affected by cancer get through their trauma through counselling and therapy. One of their therapy programs is a painting group where clients get together once a week and forget about their problems while burying themselves in canvas and paints.
I am now helping out with setting up, cleaning up afterwards, as well as guiding the clients into the right direction with advice and help.
Working here has once again inspired me to take up painting again after so many years of absence in the field. As I was used to doing purely commercial work in the advertising industry, I have never looked back and started to educate myself further into the fine arts of drawing socially as well as painting with acrylics. To achieve more of a realistic finish in my paintings, I have found coloured pencils are really rewarding. I appear to have more control over my work to achieve that realistic look and there is less mess to clean up. This medium works well especially when I create portraits of people or animals. I still found using acrylics more appealing in landscapes and seascapes. With colour pencils, I am limited to size as A3 would be a maximum size I would go, while acrylics, size can be unlimited.
In many of my experiments, I discovered that painting animals became my greatest joy. Particularly by immortalising people’s pets and provide them with a painting
that would be more unique than a photograph. These could be provided with either acrylic paints or coloured pencils.
For drawing and coloured pencil work I mostly use a quality illustration board (smooth texture) with Prismacolor pencils and graphite pencils. I find I can use many layers of colours without saturating the board or lifting the textured surface of the paper. This
board can also be very successfully used with watercolour pencil or just a wash of watercolour paint.
For acrylics, many types of surfaces are suitable. For the most economical surface, you can get some hard board or masonite (smooth one side and rough other). Depending on the finish, either side can be used. I normally use the smooth side. Just gesso (prime) the surface and your board is ready to paint on. Other surfaces that I find are very successful are either canvas board, stretched canvas on frame or a heavy duty watercolour paper. I normally use two, whatever is at hand at the time. Depending on the subject, I may even use both acrylics as a light layer of wash base with colour pencils combined. This works out best by using a heavy gauge of hot pressed watercolour paper. I have only entered a couple of art competitions at this stage, one of being the Alan Reading Memorial Art Awards here on the Coast. I was quite proud that they actually hung my paintings in their gallery, though did not win any prizes. I suppose Rome wasn’t built in a day and practice does make perfect. I feel this coming year, good things will happen.
I am not too worried about not winning, as I just love to paint. It is
very relaxing and it is a way of shutting yourself away from any problems that maybe haunting throughout life.
I have now recently started a website – www.art2all.com.au where I can share some of my work with everyone and open to commissions. I also have a facebook page to link to my website.