My Art, Experiences & My Values

I started drawing as a very young child and have drawn for as far back into my childhood as I can remember. I only rever eally concentrated on drawing cartoon characters or comic scenes, however after a big change in my life which started over 12 years ago at this point I decided to try a change with my art and challenge myself to do something new. 

I was diognosed with cancer and a tumour which I fought hard against for many many months. Sadly the cancer and tumour were inoperable so having extra treatment was my only chance of beating this awful disease. My illness incapacitated me to the level that I was unable to do very much at all not just physically but mentally also However, 5 years into my health problems, after beating the cancer and tumour, I was still struggling with many health ailments. I finally collapsed a day before I was due to have a brief stay in hospital. I was given a number of scans and xrays where it was found I had massive internal damage and damage to my discs and vertebrae from my radiotherapy treatment. From then on I was placed in a wheelchair and was left with a number of disaqbilities. This changed my life dramatically as I was no longer able to persue my regular hobbies and passions nor was able to look into the future for employment. At this point I became quite lost and unsure what my future held for me. 

This is when I found art again, so as soon as I was well enough I dug out my pencils and some reference pictures of horses and started to draw. horses, I drew a couple of different styles, sizes and poses and then moved onto drawing a dragons head, a dog and a few other things, but decided that I really wanted to achieve success with my art, and felt that to do that I needed to make some changes. I decided first I needed to find the medium I most enjoyed then I'd find my subject, so I went through a number of different mediums but the moment I tried soft pastels I knew they were what I needed to work with alongside pastel pencils. The subject wouldnt be quite so easy to find so I tried a number of different animals until one day I saw this great picture of a tree frog and I was in love. I had so much fun drawing that lite frog that I went on to draw more and decided I'd found my subjects. 

I decided to keep on practising and completely moved on to drawing animal portraits in my spare time and at the end of 2019 I was drawing horses and Frogs to a quality better than I'd ever done before. I'd gone from drawing in polychromos coloured pencil, practising daily for around 12 hours a day, sometimes more but just not being happy feeling like something was missing, to now using soft pastels and pastel pencils and everything just falling into place and for the first time in a long time feeling happy about my art. 

All my private pieces that ive drawn on request, apart from the very first 3 are created in soft pastels and my art has grown and improved over the last few years that I truly couldn't be happier. 

I love to draw horses and amphibians so hence Hooves & Frogs has now been born. 

Dee xxx