Artists of NIC: Sydney Croteau

What are you studying here at NIC?

I already graduated with my associate of science in pre-nutrition and I’m also majoring in education and art, so I’ll have three associate’s degrees when I graduate from here. It’s a lot of work.

When I go to the 4-year school, I’m going to be going to U of I and I’m not going to triple major again. Now instead I’m planning on just pursuing a BFA and, hopefully after that, I’ll get a master’s of fine art, and then hopefully I’ll be done with school.

What’s your favorite medium to work with?

Bee Eater – 10.5×13.5″ P.h. Doc. Martin’s India Inks and Caran d’Ache Luminance colored pencils on Arche’s watercolor paper.

Colored pencil, that’s an easy one. On my own time, it’s colored pencil and airbrush, all the time. I use ink and airbrush acrylics in my airbrush and I always do airbrushed backgrounds and colored pencil foregrounds. That’s why [the backgrounds] are blurry and then the subjects are really detailed because I just use the colored pencil.

Do you have a creative ritual?

Sometimes I know I can’t focus if there’s something else that still needs to be done. Like, if I still need to be doing laundry, or if I still need to do the dishes, or if I still need to make the bed, I have to have those things done and the apartment needs to be generally clean before I can actually sit down and work on something. Because otherwise I just can’t focus and I’m like, ‘I need to go do the dishes. I need to be doing that.’ So I think maybe just cleaning up a little bit before I actually work on something. I do that a lot before I work on whatever I’m going to work on.

What inspires your artwork? Do you just like animals a lot?

I love animals. You know I’m vegan, so I love animals, but I’ve always been fascinated with animals and nature and everything, and I just feel like that’s something that is incredibly important and maybe not everyone values it as highly as I feel like they should; although that’s kind of imposing my values on other people.

So, basically by drawing animals I’m just trying to get people to consider them more, because you see so many photos of things every day, animals being one of them, and a lot of times ya know, you see a cute cat video or something on Facebook and you think ‘oh that’s cute’ -scroll. And it’s just like you don’t even think about that animal as an individual or as anything more than just what it’s portrayed as in that one video. So it’s like you see it and you forget about it really quickly.

Mother’s Day – 8×10″ Holbein Airbrush Acrylics, Caran d’Ache Luminance colored pencils, and Brush and Pencil Titanium White + Touch-Up Texture on Fabriano Artistico neutral white 140 lb. hot press watercolor paper.

So what I’m hoping to convey I guess through drawing these animals photo-realistically is just I’m trying to capture every little detail and that draws the viewer in and forces them to kind of spend more time with that animal and actually think about it and not just, ‘oh that’s cool, oh whatever, bye.’  So I’m trying to get people to acknowledge them more and I have a lot of series idea in my head, like I want to do a series of endangered species so that really would say, hey you need to pay attention to these animals, they’re not unimportant, like, they matter, ya know. So I guess that’s why I draw animals. I also really love drawing animals, I don’t really like to draw people.

What’s the most frustrating part of the creative process?

Honestly, I don’t enjoy the process a whole lot. Sometimes I can get in that zone where it’s like, ‘I’m loving this,’  where you just get really into it and time goes away and everything. Sometimes I can get into that but especially during the semester trying to work on stuff outside of homework, I’m constantly thinking, ‘I could be working on homework right now,’ you know, ‘I could be doing this.’

So I can’t really get into that zone, especially during the semester and so I don’t enjoy the process as much. I enjoy the final product and as an artist, I know that it should be the other way around. I should be enjoying the process, but I like the thing at the end. But getting there is like, I just want it to be done already. I just want to get done with this one so I can do this one.

So, I don’t know, maybe that’s bad but another reason why I don’t think I fully enjoy the process all the time is because colored pencil is one of the slowest mediums because you’re working with such a fine point, to cover the whole page, so it just takes forever. Sometime’s I’ll start a new piece and I’ll be like, ‘okay, it’s going good,’ and then I’ll get like halfway through and then I’m like, ‘ugh I just lost all motivation, I want to be done.’

Why do you like working with colored pencil?

Cynosure – 8×10″ Holbein airbrush acrylics and Caran d’Ache Luminance colored pencils on Arche’s watercolor paper.

I think colored pencil, for me, has just been the one medium that I keep going back to, and I don’t really know why. But, it’s kinda what I started out with so it’s what I’m most comfortable with. I know it the best now out of all mediums, I know how colored pencils work. I know certain techniques to use to get certain effects, and I don’t have that with a lot of other mediums.

In high school, I did a lot of colored pencil pieces over anything else. Another reason I like colored pencil is because it’s clean. Whenever I paint I just splatter paint everywhere, and I don’t mean to but I’ll be painting and I’ll look up and there’s pink splattered on the wall and I’m like, ‘how did this happen?’ So, I like colored pencil a lot because it doesn’t do that, it’s really clean and it’s really easy to just put everything back when you are done. You don’t have to rinse anything out or wipe anything down, you just put your pencils back in your little pencil case and you put it away. And also the ability to get such high detail with them. I’ve always had a very good attention to detail, it’s just me.

Photo-realism and hyperrealism

I really like photo-realism and hyperrealism, and I want to get to hyperrealism. I don’t even know why I like that stuff. This girl in my class and last class was doing a presentation. She was comparing two artists who were hyperrealists and they draw, and their artwork for me is like, oh my god, that’s amazing, I want to do that. But when she was talking about it she said, “I’m not a huge fan of hyperrealism because I don’t see exactly what it offers the artistic community when you’re just recreating something that looks like a photograph.” And when she said that, I was like, yeah I totally understand what she’s saying, I don’t see it either. It’s cool, but it’s like, it’s not very imaginative to me. But then again, that’s what I gravitate toward, that’s what I love to look at; hyperrealistic art. I don’t know why I just love it a lot. Of course, artists who do other styles have lots of skill too, but for me, I guess that’s what’s made the most impact. Whenever I see something where’s it’s like, ‘oh my god, that’s a drawing? How did they do that?’ it’s mind-blowing for me.

How long does it take you to finish one picture?

It really depends. Fur takes a lot longer than anything else to draw. I can draw birds really quickly for some reason, like feathers. The one bird photo, the kookaburra, the white and brown bird, that one took me like 3 days. So, compare that to my tigers, which took me like 1-2 weeks. But that’s 1-2 weeks of every single day drawing for 9 hours straight. It’s not like every day I do 3 hours of drawing and I’m done, no. It takes a long time. So with my tiger one, I estimated I probably spent like 63 hours on it. With my kookaburra, I probably spent closer to 30 hours on it. So I think it just depends on the subject but usually like anywhere from 20 to over 50 hours, give or take.

How do you focus for 9 hours drawing on the same picture?

I just don’t have anything else to do. I mean, during the summer I didn’t have a job. I tried to find a job but no one called me back after I gave them my resume, and I’m like, ‘Screw it, I’m just going to make art my job because no one wants me to work for them.’ So, I did.

All I did over the entire summer last summer was educate myself on the business side of art, stuff that we don’t learn in school, and practice my drawing to get it up to the skill set that I want to be at basically. So I think just doing that and making art my job just helped me sit down and be like, ok well I have to work right now, because my boyfriends at work so if he’s working, I’m working.

I have a hard time just enjoying my free time. I don’t know why but I have a hard time sitting down and playing games all day, because I love video games but I can’t sit there anymore and play them for as long as I used to, because now if I’m sitting there and playing a game, I’m like,’I could be drawing. I could be doing something a lot more productive than this’. I think that’s just a big part of it, I just can’t do mindless activities anymore, as much as I used to, because I’m just not okay with it with myself anymore. I just have to always be doing something productive. It’s like a blessing and a curse.

All photos courtesy of Sydney Croteau

For more of Croteau’s art, click here.