LET'S FACE IT 2022 - ARTISTS/INSTRUCTORS

Angela Kennedy

I live in Southern Oregon with my Husband and two boys. I enjoy many different mediums but my favorites are watercolor and colored pencil. I enjoy drawing faces, whimsical and realistic. I started teaching online art classes in 2010 and enjoy sharing my process and helping others grow as artists.

Christa Forrest

Christa is a full-time artist specializing in pastel, oil, acrylic and mixed media art. After spending 20 years in a finance career, she decided to follow her true passion and become a full-time artist. Christa spends her time sharing her passion with others, teaching others to be creative and exploring the world's landscape recreating it onto canvas. Her work is a mixture of realism, exploration, experimentation and pure fun.

She recently began creating a detailed and expressive Goddess series where she incorporates the divine feminine and illustrates the strength many women struggle to connect with in their daily lives. “We remember to nourish our bodies with food and water but seem to forget to remember to nourish our souls.” Why do we find our inner selves starving and yearning for something more? Christa hopes to encourage everyone to unleash their inner Goddess through her artwork. A current project is in the works to help others unleash their creative soul through art, music and creative expression. Helping creatives learn to nourish the soul, Creative Souls Art will explore creating from within and intuitively without the pressure of perfection and judgement.

Daniel Ibanez

Hello! My name is Daniel Ibanez, I am a fine artist and illustrator from Colorado in the Western USA. Like many artists, I just love to create. I love many mediums, but I am a painter at heart. My favorite subject is figurative and portrait work. My favorite way of painting this subject is with a symbolic or sci-fi twist. I have been at this professionally since I was 15 years old. My gallery art career was always centered in the Southwest. I was featured in Southwest Art Magazine as one of America’s promising young artists. My work at the time was mostly landscapes, portraits, and still lives. That traditional gallery work was an amazing way to make a living! I later finished my art degree at university and earned a teaching certificate.

I wanted to try to juggle both teaching and painting full time. I fell in love with teaching! But it was incredibly hard to manage both careers. Over the years I slowly found a balance. I was able to be both an effective teacher and prolific artist. Around that time I started tinkering with digital painting. I found online fame when Google+ added me to their recommended users list. I amassed 1.5 million followers right at the moment I was discovering digital painting. I began to teach digital painting online freely through Google Hangouts. It was a special time of discovering a new medium while simultaneously sharing that experience with others. The new form of painting led to an explosion of subject matter for me. I had skipped the adolescent part of my art life by starting straight into landscape painting. Now, I found myself diving into Science Fiction, Concept art, Fantasy art, Surrealism. My work became entirely new. These developments led to being asked to do a Tedx talk, comics, Magazine and newspaper features, a few book covers, and advertising art that ended up in ImagineFx magazine. I then started doing Comic Cons on a whim and ended up being scheduled for SDCC in 2021. While doing all of this, I have built up a list of client projects, commissions, shows, and events like Plein Air painting for the Colorado Governor's show.

Deanna Strachan-Wilson

I live in Eugene, Oregon with my husband and two cats. I work full-time helping people find jobs and housing. I also enjoy white water kayaking! Because I work full-time, I need to find time to create in small chunks. Watercolor and other water soluble materials work perfect for this. I love using my sketchbook to play and have fun without the pressure of creating a masterpiece every time. Momentum and ideas come from each small piece I create which sometimes leads to something larger. My goal is to do something artistic as often as possible, keep the momentum going, and learn, share, and grow with my art community.

Dina Wakley

Dina is a mixed-media artist and teacher. She loves everything about art: creating it, thinking about it, looking at it, and teaching it. She has been scrapbooking since 1995, stamping since 1996, and art journaling since 2004. She believes in writing yourself down, expressing yourself, and making your mark on the world. As a Ranger Signature Designer, Dina designs a line of mixed-media art supplies that includes acrylic paints, mediums, brushes, rubber stamps, stencils, and more.

Dylan Sara

I am an Australian born illustrator, artist and father based in Göttingen Germany.

I love working with ink and connecting with people from around the world. I host two weekly online sketch sessions where we hang out chat and draw each other. It's great fun and practice. Get in touch if you'd like to join.

An important aspect of my work and life is being in nature. Making ink from foraged natural materials and creating work inspired by people and places is my passion and I look forward to sharing this passion with you.

Emma Petitt

I create large, colourful expressive Portraits and figurative work. My ladies always have a sense of fun and connection. I love to play with distortion and reality, just a little bit! I love to include hands into my portrait work because they add so much more expression and narrative.
I came to painting late in my life and have really only painting portraits and people for the last 5 years. This decision coincided with the life changing decision to move from the UK to Sunny Spain. Here, I was so inspired by the light and freedom that I truly became the Artist I always wanted to be.

Flo Lee

Flo is a Bristol, UK based figurative/portrait Artist. Flo is influenced by modern day expressionist figurative artists who focus on the visibility of brushstrokes within a painting. Flo’s fascination of the visible inner engineering & process of a painting came from seeing more traditional artwork at a young age. The pursuance of making every mark count, some paintings with more details than others, is what Flo is aiming for.

Flo is also interested in the ability our minds have to finish unfinished lines or areas of paintings, often intentionally leaving areas raw or underdeveloped. She mainly works in acrylic and more recently has started to explore with Oil paint. She is a prolific creator, drawing or painting every day, she feels this is necessary for her to reach her personal skill level goals, but also finds it meditative.

Flo aims to create Art that is interesting, approachable, unpretentious and enjoyable. She herself enjoys art for its aesthetic and technical values. She appreciates art that has a message or statement to convey but this is by no means a compulsory quality in art for her enjoyment.

She studied for her foundation Fine Art Degree in Bristol and finished her studies but completing a Fine Art Diploma. She has held a couple of smaller scale solo exhibitions and has had work featured on online platforms.

Flo’s future practice hope is to become a master of her own craft, to reach people that enjoy art both on face value and to those who choose to seek a deeper meaning. She would love to be able to inspire others to relentlessly pursue their passion as she has hers, after returning to it 15 years post study.
Her original Artworks including commissions and Prints have been collected Internationally. Flo will be looking to exhibit more frequently in the future.

Jana Duca

My paintings are about connections (or lack thereof) between people and the world. I paint the psychological space between people and the space between words. The push and pull of the paint that causes the background to encroach upon the figures and take away pieces of them, or that causes the figure to dissolve and scatter into the environment describes the figures’ psychological state.

Connections, people, and how people interact with their social environments are fascinating subjects to me, partially because of my somewhat nomadic childhood – I moved almost once a year, and was constantly having to adjust to new schools, people, and environments. So, I started studying them and how they interacted with one another, and with me.

I can’t not make art – it is just something I have to do to describe how I see the world and to reflect what is going through my head. For me, painting is more expressive and easier than words.

My art is how I connect with people and the world. I hope you enjoy my work, and I hope that it has connected with you.

Jen Starling

Jen focused seriously on ballet and modern dance throughout her childhood and adult life. She has a BA in Performance Art from the University of MD, and danced professionally for many years. She dabbled in visual art from a young age, but has very little formal training. In May 2015 she took an art class that awoke her creative nature, and propelled her into the world of two dimensional art. No stranger to discipline, she has dedicated herself to learning from many accomplished artists, a demanding studio practice, and managing her business, “Jen Starling Art”. In addition, Jen has an elementary teaching license, and has taught youth and adults in numerous settings for the last twenty years. She currently teaches art classes at the Art Student League and Curtis Art Center in CO.

Jennifer Bonneteau

Jennifer Bonneteau is painter, teacher and expressive arts coach living and working in Murrieta, CA. Jen believes we were all born with creative gifts and a desire to connect with one another, and that art is a conduit for that connection. Through her work as an artist and teacher, she hopes to inspire others to tell their personal stories through their own creative expression.

Jen began her love affair with expressive painting in 2014. She finds the spontaneous painting process allows her to both lose and find herself at the same time. Ane often paints portraits because Jen feels alive and connected to humanity when she’s attempting to capture the essence of a person in a painting...it's often a spiritual experience for her.

Jennifer’s artistic style resonates in the genres of abstract realism and modern Impressionism. She draws inspiration from her faith, friends, family, music and various life experiences.

Joan Martin

Joan Martin is an artist and high school art teacher who lives in Durban on the tropical east coast of South Africa.

Joan Martin works predominantly in mixed media and her attitude to art-making has been described as "reflecting intense curiosity and creative courage". She often subverts her own process by consciously using tools that she can't control or by splashing materials over her work that can potentially destroy the image. Experimentation and making marks is what drives her artistic journey. She believes that too many people see art as a product instead of an experience. She includes experimentation and play in both her own art and in her teaching and claims that if you are not prepared to make mistakes you won’t learn.

Joan Martin has been involved in group exhibitions in her own country and Internationally (USA, Canada and France)

Various local art studios and galleries have invited her to run adult workshops and present talks about art. She has taught online art lessons for various art associations since 2018. She has also assisted as a curator for various local art galleries.

Juan Perednik

My name is Juan Perednik, I was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina in 1989. I have been drawing since I can remember and it is one of the things that I enjoy doing the most, it is my true passion. Each drawing is a new experience, a challenge and an opportunity. Drawing is the most sincere form of art and the most solid basis for working with any other technique. I look at life and what happens to me through my lines. Drawing teaches me about frustration, perseverance, overcoming, insistence, patience, anxiety and the enjoyment of today and now.

This obsession with the line led me to work with people like The Rock (Dwayne Johnson), Josh Brolin, PayPal, MercadoLibre, Channel 13, Marcelo Tinelli, among many others. I invite you to accompany each other on this incredible and infinite journey full of lines that is drawing!

You can always write to me through my instagram @juanperednik to take classes with me, buy a work or even order a drawing on request!

EVERYONE can draw.

THANK YOU!

Juan.

Juna Biagioni

My name is Juna Biagioni, I’m an artist and online art teacher offering online classes to people from all over the world – both beginners and more experienced artists.

Art is my biggest passion! Making art is such a wonderful way to express myself and to connect with others.

I create abstract work but also love making portraits, working with all kinds of materials and supplies, such as acrylic paint, charcoal, pastel, collage, and more. I’m fascinated by the use of light and shadow, and working with texture.

I love to convey emotions and stories through faces, trying to capture some kind of ‘soul’ in my work – in an unpolished way. Soul can be soft, tender, and beautiful, but also difficult or raw. All these aspects are welcome in my work and interesting to explore.

My main goal as an art teacher is to help people discover their own creativity and become more confident in making art. It’s such a beautiful process to see participants in my classes trying out new techniques, learning new skills – maybe a bit hesitant or scared in the beginning, but then becoming more and more confident in their own abilities, leaving their inner critic to the side, and discovering their unique artistic voice. I feel privileged to be part of that process!

Kara Bullock

I'm a people watcher, a dream chaser, and a go getter! Not long ago I was watching my first online art video and thought to myself, I CAN DO THAT!

Today, I run an online art school that offers classes to inspire your art and business. I always thought that it was art that I loved, but I recently realized that people are my true passion, and art has been my vehicle for making connections with others all over the world!

I am happy you are here, and look forward to connecting with you and supporting your creative journey!

Kathy Lewis

I began taking online art classes, met Kara Strachan Bullock, and took almost all of the workshops she hosted at her local studio. I was in heaven to have this new friend and later her wonderful studio located less than 20 minutes from home! I also continued online courses and one had a particularly awesome affect on my art journey. It was taught by Jeanne-Marie Webb called "the soulbearers". I would never in a million years have expected to fall in love with sculpting clay! When working with clay I felt peace and joy unlike anything ever before experienced. I have not put it down in four years and continue to find great pleasure in creating with clay. It is my 'go to' art medium. I create purely from the heart having had no formal sculpting education and somehow I am afraid to pursue the art of sculpting in a formal way because I am afraid it would ruin the freedom with which I create. I hope to spread the joy of creating in clay, something that young and old, beginner and experienced can enjoy. I hope you can experience the feeling i heard in my granddaughter's comment recently when she said, "Grandma, I am so happy making this (clay sculpture). It is the most wonderful thing I have ever made."

Katrina Szyszkoski

I am a Colorado Rockies-based artist with an attraction to broken Hellenistic stone sculpture, portraiture, and all things whimsical.

My delicately formed mixed media figurative sculpture and 2D portraits have an emphasis on the female face and figure. They evoke a sense of daintiness, dreaminess, and playfulness along with a bit of absurdity.

Much of my inspiration comes from my mother, an artist, and also my years living and traveling in Japan, where I was surrounded by the uniqueness and ambiguity of contemporary Japanese art and craft.

I studied at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the College for Creative Studies in Detroit, MI where I received a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree.

When not tending to my family including four children, two nutty dogs and one besieged but defiant cat, I enjoy playing the harp and piano, in addition to creating, assembling, and drawing in my own curious and unexpected bent.

Lauren Rudolph

Lauren Rudolph was born in New Jersey and currently lives in Nyack, NY where she works as a portrait artist and instructor. From a very early age Lauren was drawn to portraiture. She has always had a fascination with the face and the essence of what it means to be human. Early in her creative life, pastels were her medium of choice, but she was deeply inspired by paint which she has explored through both acrylics and oils. She feels that there is a life and an energy in painting that is full of depth and that there is so much to yet uncover. Lauren began her college education at the School of Visual Arts in NYC and received her BA in art from the University at Albany. At 44 years of age, she feels that she is now truly the student she desires to be, always open to learning, growing and allowing the artistic process to lead the way.

Maria Pace-Wynters

Maria Pace-Wynters was born and raised in Victoria, British Columbia. She attended Victoria College of Art, Camosun College (Associate of Arts degree), the University of Victoria (BFA honor program) and Victoria Film School before settling down in Edmonton, Alberta with her singer/songwriter/soulmate husband, Chris Wynters and their two daughters, Imogen and Scarlett. Maria has a studio/gallery in Edmonton where she sells her unique and colourful mixed media paintings. Maria’s paintings and reproductions are collected by her loyal fans worldwide. She also sells her work online through Etsy.

Melanie Rivers

Melanie Rivers, Tiyaltelwet, is an Indigenous mixed media artist and expressive arts guide who teaches online art classes to women around the world. She helps women build joyful and self-compassionate art practices. Melanie has taught as a part of international art teams in art journal and portrait courses and Summits such as Life Book, Let’s Face It, and SketchBook Revival. Melanie says, “Creating art brings me into the present moment, into stillness. In this space I am not dwelling on the past or worrying about the future. In stillness, I find myself. I find peace, clarity and connection with my real emotions”. Melanie is from the Squamish First Nation in Vancouver, Canada. She lives in her community with her wonderful husband of 21 years and she draws from her traditional ancestry and teachings in her art practice. In her art, she depicts the strength, realness and vulnerability of women. She believes art has many medicines to share with us—stillness, joy, connection-- and by building a self- compassionate art practice, we can experience these medicines on a regular basis.

Nadyia Duff

Nadyia Duff is a Jamaican/American Artist, Art Educator, and Museum Educator.

Nadyia Duff creates elaborate narratives using her method of drawing and painting. She combines the painterly and realistic. Every layer is a unique and uncalculated build up of mediums and color. The juxtaposition of roughly drawn background imagery and the detailed subject imagery creates vast visual narratives.

Nick George

Nick George (b. 1982, Manchester, England) is a former professional athlete turned expressionist painter. His sporting career, which included lengthy stops in Spain, France, Switzerland, and Italy, has heavily influenced his art making in distinctive ways and enabled him to investigate new ideas of culture and beauty.

George’s portraits, which are an amalgamation of people he has met thought his journey, derive inspiration from abstraction, exploding in a flourish of colorful, exuberant energy married with poetry and symbolism.

Patrick Greenwell

Patrick’s artistic journey has been long and varied. Drawing and painting have always been his mainstay, but for a while, he was a wedding and portrait photographer. That was back when film and darkrooms were the norm. Although he doesn’t pick up a camera as often these days, creating images is still the language that helps him best understand his life. Holding true to his history in portraiture, his work in various media is comprised mostly of faces.

Almost a decade ago, he left the city of Denver for the wilds of New Mexico, where he says the desert informs and often confuses him. But it is through this dichotomy that much of his recent work has surfaced.

His ongoing project Morning Sketches has lasted several years. The project is simply a pencil sketch of a face (some say the same face) posted nearly every morning on Instagram. It came about one morning as he was trying to decipher a dream from the night before. His lifelong habit of journaling just didn’t suffice. In 2018 he self published an ebook called Morning Sketches: Drawings, Thoughts, Time. It loosely chronicles the journey of the project and is available for free from his website.

Patrick lives and works in the desert outside of Santa Fe, New Mexico with his wife, Nichole and their canine friend, Maggie.

Pia Rom

PiaRom is a selftaught mixed media artist who teaches art journaling in person and online since 2014 .
She is from Germany and lives with her husband near Frankfurt in a lil town surrounded by wineyards and nature.
She always had the urge to be creative and adventurous. Find herself traveling, diving, riding, dancing, climbing, hiking and now art journaling.

In her art she love to play with collage elements and abstraction to create little stories.
She teach how to use all sorts of paper: magazines, selfmade, scprabook and vintage ones to create interesting background and take them to the next level by painting over them. A wild mix out of everything from of her studio will find place in her colorful creations. The idea of remix stuff into something new has always inspired her! Being playful and intuitive with her art supplies she shows how to relax into the process.

She says: " I find out that trusting my inner voice is so important and by journling I can relearn to hear them wisper again. To know the painting will be lovely in the end feels so soothing und let me enjoy every step on the way. I so savor to bring this to my students and can see the sparks in their eyes when they get it!

Glueing stuff down is the most relaxing part of the creative process for me and doing this as often as possible helps me safe my sanity. I love to solve problems and so it is no wonder I first create them with wild and crazy speads to then can „heal“ them into lovely storyful pages. It happens often that I found their meanings only weeks later. Sometimes they just shine and bring me happyness. Similar to my dreams: nothing is obvious, everything is symbolic, mysterious and kinda funny.
So come and discover your own colorful stories with me and maybe find a new passion!“

Robert Kelley

I am Rob Kelley and I am a fine artist/illustrator with a focus on portraiture! I live in Stockton, California, and am a single dad to three children. I studied graphic design at UC Davis and then went on to study illustration at Academy of Art in San Francisco. Although I have had an extensive education in art, I abandoned art for most of my adult life. That changed, 4 years ago, when my life hit a dramatic shift. At this time, I began looking at why I was in a constant state of low-level unhappiness and discovered that I had abandoned my true and authentic self. I knew that the one thing I needed that had been missing was art! Since then, I have adopted a sink or swim mentality!

Sabra Awlad Issa

I’m Sabra, a self-taught portrait artist from the Netherlands. I was always interested in drawing but never chose to dedicate myself. Instead I built a business in application design and development. As most of us do, I tried very hard to balance my need for art and music with work, deadlines and clients. The result was that I failed at both; my work was draining my energy, leaving me too tired to recharge with art at night.

A few years ago my son asked me, “should I do things that make me unhappy?”. As my brain was trying to come up with an answer suitable for a 7-year-old, every other fiber in my body screamed “NO!”. No, you shouldn’t kiddo. That question touched me so deeply at the time and I realized that instead of answering it, I needed to start living my answer. A few months later I quit everything and started painting every day. I’ve never been more driven, content and scared all at the same time.

I paint humans. Often I wonder if maybe I should try painting something else. Or add some object or symbol. But then I end up painting another face. It took a while but I’ve accepted that that is what I do. If I had to paint the same face every day for the rest of my life, I’d still be happy. Kara Bullock’s Let’s Face It was my first experience with online teaching and I’ll be forever grateful for that. Being in this art community is one of the best things that has come into my life and I’m so happy to be a part of it again this year.

Tara Roskell

From a very young age, I loved to draw and I dreamt of being an artist when I grew up. I used to paint and draw in a traditional style, but that changed when I went to art college and we were encouraged to experiment.

I went on to study graphic design and I’ve now been a graphic designer for over 25 years. But because everything in that field is digital, I stopped creating by hand and as a result, I lost my passion for drawing and painting.

A few years ago I connected online with another artist called Sandra Busby. The two of us started setting each other creative challenges. It was through doing these challenges that I rediscovered my love of drawing by hand again. At first, it felt strange to draw by hand; I was so out of practice and I was used to having that easy ‘undo’ button. But it wasn’t long before that spark was reignited and now I don’t want to create digitally anymore. I feel it's the quirks and imperfections that bring a piece of work to life.

Sandra and I, now encourage other people to be creative through our website and podcast Kick in the Creatives.

Near the beginning of last year, I set myself a 60-day challenge to ‘Find My Art Style’ and completely fell in love with Neocolor 2 pastels; they are so immediate, punchy and vibrant. They are also very versatile. My favourite subjects to draw are semi-abstract faces and characters. I am a big dog lover so dogs often appear with my characters too.