My Creative Nature

An online ‘love affair’ with coloured pencil artworks was just the beginning. After developing a website to meet with similar minded people, this artist is now in the final stages of launching her first online coloured pencil classes.

- Belinda Lindhardt

Like so many, my journey as an artist started at a very young age. I can see now as my youngest child is in his second year of school just how early it must have been within me. There are so many similarities, he is always so meticulous about his work and incorporating some kind of drawing. I remember doing this as a child, spending hours on a drawing for no other reason than being immersed in the art.

As a child, I remember being drawn by the smell and feel of a fresh packet of pencils and had a longing for those special “Derwent Artist” pencils that the others had in my class (many people I meet today tell me this is their experience also). My creative nature stayed with me during school but not overly so and as I was becoming an adult I remember being told that I needed to “find something that I loved to do” when deciding on the next step. From there I became a graphic designer and transitioned into web design back in the day when it was a very specialised field. During those first few years of my career I started my own business and worked primarily on web projects, meaning that there was a lot of time with code and not so much with creativity. I often visited art exhibitions often wishing “I could do that” so one day I got out of the “should” and actually got started “doing”.

Naturally I was spending lots of time on the internet, so it was there I looked and came across an online forum of artists (Wetcanvas) and within that I stumbled upon group of coloured pencil artists who had posted tutorials online of how to work with pencils. I took one look at a few of those wellknown artists’ works (Ann Kullberg and Arlene Steinberg) and it was there that my love affair with pencils began. I participated in the forums and posted my work online where I followed these fabulous artists’ advice. The more I did it the more and more I loved it.