Hi! I’m Sam and I like the paint things!
Creepy crawly things, landscapes, and the horrible creatures my friends thing of way too late in the evening.
I’m not a professional artist by any means. I got as far as GCSE art before realising that doing the A-level would be like taking a canon to any further desire to create. I’ve never sold a painting, and haven’t won any competitions. The closest I’ve ever come was as a finalist of the 2016 Young Cartoonist of the Year, but it was never something I took particularly seriously.
So whats all this then?
This is an attempt to maintain the momentum and progress I’ve made over the past year and a bit. If you’ve looked in my gallery you’ll have noticed a frankly obnoxious number of watercolour snails. This isn’t because I was suddenly struck down with an addiction to drawing shells, but a consequence of a little side project I kept over the last few years.
In the second half of my university career I was studying a neat genus of colourful snails, and knew that at the end of my projects I would almost certainly be making a painting of them for my supervisor. But I had to learn how to paint the little blighters first.
It took a year of experimenting to make the final piece (which is honestly one of the best things I’ve ever made) and it was the first time where I had a project which made me learn new skills, new techniques in layering colour. My work had significantly improved. I had unfortunately discovered that practice does makes perfect.
So the purpose of this blog is accountability. To record my journey into learning new skills in biological illustration. Maybe anyone who reads these will learn something about painting – who knows!
