7th January 2016
Meet Madeline! She’s the first of a series of funky faces in acrylics that I’ll be working on over the next few weeks.
Madeline’s pretty important because she takes me back to my late teens when I predominantly drew people, faces and clothes. I’d actually been offered a place at art college to do fashion design, but I didn’t take the place in the end and instead went to a local college to study office practice and typing (which, by the way, I hated, although, admittedly, these skills have come in very handy since.) Generally, I could be found sketching fellow students in the coffee bar – okay, I confess, I may have missed a few classes, which probably explains why I failed so badly at shorthand (groan!)
Anyway, I digress… those of you who’ve been following my arty 
progress over the last year or two will perhaps see Madeline as a departure from the art I normally produce, which has been mostly inspired by animals, birds and nature, but actually Madeline is a return to the ‘me’ pre a string of different job, children and all that comes with that. She is a bit of a throw back to the eighties with a splatter of 21st Century (those of you who were teens in the eighties, who remember punk and new romanticism and the amazing artwork produced by artists for Athena, may find a familiarity in Madeline and feel quite at home with her.)
She is also redolent of the ‘me’ that I now am in that as a teen and into my early twenties I worked solely in pencil. There was no forethought to this – I simply hated painting! It turns out though to have been of huge benefit as years of drawing in pencil, learning tones and shades of light and dark, really prepares you for detailed painting later. The painted Madeline couldn’t have happened if it hadn’t been for all the work put into drawing all those years ago.
There’s a bigger purpose to Madeline too as I am hoping that she and her friends (watch this space) will be printed as greeting cards within the next couple of months. Who knows, they may even appear in other forms too.
Happy new year – here’s to new ventures and oodles of creative stuff x
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