I started out in art wanting to encourage my 6-year-old son who loved to draw (he’s an adult now).  But I, myself, had no idea how to, so I googled how to draw faces.  Whilst watching a YouTube video and copying along with it, something just clicked.  From there I couldn’t stop researching and learning how to draw.  My passion for art had well and truly started and over time I became quite good at graphite pencil portraits.

However, I had always had a love of colour so a few years later when I was forced to stop working due to ill health, I decided to turn to the internet once again to teach myself how to paint.  Although I am mostly self taught I have done several short term courses and workshops.   I really enjoy painting and found it a lot more fun than working with pencils. It allows the freedom to play around with different brushes and techniques to create interesting results. And with paint you can easily make any changes by simply painting over the top. If I want a different background colour no problem just redo it. It allows more expression as the painting progresses, I don’t have to stick to my original plan I can be more creative as the painting progresses.

Being a former make-up artist, I have always had a love of faces, so I guess that’s why I started my art journey doing pencil portraits.  After a while I moved towards painting animals, as they have equally expressive faces but allow a bit more freedom than human faces.  You don’t need to be quite so precise and can often use a lot more variety of colours when painting so many different types of animals.

My favourite medium to work with is oil paints, I love their smooth buttery consistency which allows me to do many different techniques.  I also love the vibrancy and depth of colours that I can only seem to get from using oil paints.

I am the type of artist who paints what I see so this works well with the realism style of art that I love to create. I get so caught up in all the fine details that it takes me to another world where nothing else exists except each brushstroke that I am working on.  So much so that when I step back and looks at the whole painting, I often even surprise myself.  I love watching the painting come to life on the canvas.  Whilst I still mostly paint faces, I also love painting a variety of different things and will paint whatever I am drawn to at the time.  So that might be flowers, landscapes or basically anything that I see that I find interesting.

Being an artist is an ever-growing lifelong learning process continuing to experiment and try new things.  Each painting I do teaches me something about art and about myself.  This is something that I enjoy about being an artist and I look forward to seeing where this journey takes me in the future.