Artists of NIC: Catherine Kennedy

Catherine Kennedy is a Graphic Design student at NIC hailing from Rathdrum, ID. Her art focuses on animals, nature and occasionally people. She typically works with acrylic paint, charcoal, and spray paint, but she enjoys exploring a variety of different mediums.

Willow (me): What is your favorite medium to work with?

Catherine: As a favorite, I think charcoal is on the top, but acrylic paint is right below that and spray paint is really fun but it’s tricky to get down, so tricky. It’s all really thoughtful, you have to put a lot of thought into what you’re doing; its spray paint, you can’t take it back, you can’t erase it, you just gotta go. It’s kind of ridiculous trying to get spray paint down. Initially, when I first tried spray paint it was a couple years ago and I couldn’t get it down for the life of me and I just quit on it, I outright quit on it…

Catherine flicked white paint from her fingers to create the small white stars.

…by the time I got to the moon, I did it by accident, getting that nice moon texture. I use a lot of different techniques to get those little craters and the big ones. It was a huge gamble on what I was doing..I was like okay, let’s try this, and that thing, kinda not thinking about it and just going and seeing what works out.

W: Why do you like to paint animals? 

C: I do really like animals. There’s so much variety with animals, their fur textures vs. horns, there’s so much visual interest with animals. With people, there can be, depending on what they’re doing, but for the most part, all people have 2 arms and 2 legs and 2 eyes…But there’s not as much visual interest with people for me.

Planning a Painting

Catherine usually draws or paints animals from reference photos, but an animal she likes to draw to practice different techniques like shading is the octopus because of its big bulbous head and twisting tentacles.

C: When I want to paint something I’ll plan out the painting, I’ll pre-paint it in my head and a lot of that comes from practicing a lot in unstructured ways…I’ve got a piece of paper and I’ve got all of my new colors here and I just throw them on there in different ways to see how they interact with each other and I log that into memory so that later when I want to create that similar effect then I can do it. It lets me pre-paint images in my head..It creates a plan in my head for what I need to do, and there is a lot of planning involved before I actually paint something, even if it’s all just mental planning…

On paintings, like the cow painting…I do start out with a nice rough pencil sketch and I do shade in areas and say, “okay so here needs to be darker, here needs to be lighter” and just really block things out in that way so I keep things in proportion and keep the image centered where I want it.

That one (drawing to left) was [me] just wanting to try out my charcoals ‘cause I just got them, and so really seeing how dark I could get her hair to be, and creating those nice soft shadows on her face was enlightening on how to properly use charcoal and it also taught me your photos look a lot better when you actually clean up the smudges around everything. 

I have also messed around with watercolor, but not in the way you’re supposed to..I kind of painted with it like you would oils or acrylic…much less water and much more paint when I did it, they still blend really well, it [just] doesn’t look like water color anymore.

W: What inspires you?

C: A lot of my inspiration for things does come from the things I see…overanalyzing how someone looks or how their clothes fold or how shadow falls on things and different textures…

One thing I have found on Instagram as a reference is ‘How Blood Impacts Different Surfaces.” So, it was a drop of blood onto a bunch of different things like wood, snow, grass, paper, and it was really interesting to see the differences in how things interacted with each other. It’s just something to give more understanding to the world around you. The better [your] understanding is about how things interact with each other, the better the drawing, or painting. 

Leaves and Observation

I’ve been walking around carrying these 3 leaves with me for the last hour because I saw a tree out there that had these wonderful red leaves. For the most part, when you look at the tree it looks mostly this middle ground orangey-red color and crimson.

I have trouble with color harmonies; I’m learning that right now so when I saw that tree, I said, ‘Okay, it looks like it’s one color but I know it’s not so I have to go and find 3 colors: the lightest, the middle, and the nicest darker one.’ And so now I have this wonderful reference of colors for if I was to create a tree of that same shade. These nice 3 leaves here, taking something that’s literally what it is, and real, and applying it. [The tree] was beautiful and I loved it, and I over-observed it entirely.

W: Do you have a creative ritual?

C: I used to when I was younger, like 14 or 15. I really had to get myself in the drawing mood, and it was really odd what I would do, I think…I would get all my stuff set up, and I would have two things that were always in my field of view. One was a green fluorite stone, I just set that off to the side of the paper, and the other thing was [a little white porcelain dish with blue paintings of Japanese buildings] from my traditional Japanese watercolor set.

Re-interpreted Drawing

I’d always drawn, since I was little, and I had one drawing that I did (as a 3-year-old)…I believe my mom actually did the hair on this character because I wanted her to draw with me…It was a really weird doodle…Looking at that I decided to do a re-draw of that at my current skill level, and so I kept the blue color because I thought that was a very interesting core part of it and so basically I did a more realistic version. 

It turned out to be a really creepy drawing…but it was very interesting to re-interpret my own drawing. It’s really fun to reinterpret a drawing. It was an age difference of 14 years in my art skill, 3-17 [years old].

Special effects makeup

I’ve briefly dabbled in special effects makeup…I did create a little pair of elf ears and a fairy nose, and I turned my sister into a forest elf…she had a green wig and I’d taken an airbrush and completely greened her out…and did some little vines going down her face…

Catherine transformed her sister into a forest elf with special effects makeup. 

W: What is the most difficult part of art for you?

C: Sometimes it’s hard to get the time to do it, sometimes it’s hard to get the motivation to do it, and sometimes it’s hard to master a new technique. I kind of describe myself as an amateur everything, professional nothing…

The worst thing you can do to a notebook is not fill it, I do that frequently, I have the artist problem of notebook addiction, where you see a new notebook, sketchbook, and you just wanna get it, even though you haven’t filled up your last one.

Catherine is open for commissions and can be contacted at:

artistcamk@hotmail.com

https://www.facebook.com/artistryink.1/

Photos courtesy of Catherine Kennedy.