Ever since I decided to become an illustrator I wanted to be able to paint with my very own hands using real materials. I'm not saying that colouring digitally is easy, in fact it can be a lot of work but it has some advantages over painting manually such as unlimited colour palettes, Ctrl+Z, Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V, etc.
After a few years working mostly on digital illustrations I decided that it was time to let go of my fears and inhibitions about painting and that I should try again ( I tried before but I never did more than a couple of paintings and then gave up, so I never improved). My chance came when I received an open brief from my agents requesting greeting cards for a variety of occasions. I decided that I was going to paint and more importantly, that I was going to stick to it until I felt proud of my paintings.
It was a physical and mental challenge and most of the paintings were not commercially viable, but I did manage to produce a few nice paintings and the most exciting part was that I got to license some of them! That was a big boost to my confidence and I'm happy to report that I'm still painting, both for myself and for clients!
I also decided to have a sketchbook that I use only for paintings and I have been using it to create random illustrations and experimenting. On top of that I became quite addicted to creating time-lapse videos that you can watch on my Instagram.
That's it for now. I hope you feel inspired to do whatever it is that you always wanted to do but were too scared of doing!
