The Artist
As far back as I can remember I always liked to draw and would spend hours getting quite good only to put the graphite pencils away again for years at a time. Each time I went back to the sketch books it was like starting over. Then one day I discovered drawspace.com and started to read about the courses. I attempted many of their free lessons and picked up a lot of tips and techniques along the way. In June of 2009, I signed up for my first online course with Cindy Wider.
Under Cindy Wider's guidance my drawings began to take on a 3-dimensional realism that had always eluded me before. The course started with simple shapes and progressed to learning to see light, understanding shadows, and noticing shading nuances that really made the drawings come to life. Then we learned to draw with willow charcoal as the sketch on the left side of the page illustrates. Willow charcoal, to me, is almost like painting in black and white.
The last two of the six courses was an introduction to painting in acrylics. First we learned how to mix colours and then how to create an original piece of art. The courses were over much too soon but I have not been able to set the paint brushes aside since I started this journey. I have now earned a certificate in the Basics of Art, an accomplishment I'm enormously proud of achieving.
Since I couldn't possible hang all the paintings I have done and will do on my own walls, I'm offering them up for sale. Painting for me is a way to always remember moments in time. I'm inspired by the beauty all around us in nature as well as in architecture and I'm seeing the world through very different eyes than when I started out. Now I find myself photographing interesting evening cloud and sky colors, wild flowers growing in a ditch, or some interesting nook or cranny that I want to remember and possibly paint.
