I am a Sydney based graphic designer that likes to draw faces. I started drawing pencil portraits when I was twelve but these were difficult to print because pencil isn’t dark enough to scan well, so I changed to biro for my portraits and that has been my favourite medium ever since. I mainly do commission portraits but this tends to be limited by the quality of the photos that people submit to me. I much prefer to take the photos myself so I can set up the lighting, but this is not always possible.
Since 2014 I have been teaching art classes. This has forced me to expand my capabilities into colour so that I can give my students some guidance. I started with hard pastels which allowed me to maintain my drawing style and I am gradually adapting to watercolour since this was my students’ preferred medium.
My style has no doubt been influenced by all the page layouts, logos and illustrations I have designed. Since my artwork began from a drawing perspective, I have always been disappointed by the way drawings (even by the masters) often ignore the highlights on their subjects since the artist is adding the shadows to a blank piece of paper. Unless the artist really pushes their mid-tones then they never maximise the little sparkles here and there. As a result, my aim in my art has always been to produce a picture with the same gravity as a photograph. I love reflected light and the gradations of shadow on curved surfaces.
Teaching art to other people with different aims and aspirations has also taught me to relax my passion for depicting exactly what is visible. As a result of experimenting with watercolour I have come to enjoy the unpredictability of wet-on-wet painting which has added some spontaneity to my pictures which I don’t normally embrace. I still have to add a layer of pastel to my paintings so I can exercise sufficient control to keep me content, but someday I may develop enough understanding of a paintbrush to tolerate painting as a stand-alone medium.