About…

Valerie Woelk

artist, illustrator, writer, and graphic designer

Have you ever wondered what goes into a career as an artist or illustrator “behind-the-scenes”? On this Blog, I share info about my art and what is happening in my spare time.

Why?

Simply because, my spare time is almost as full of creative antics as my time spent in the studio. Artist’s can’t help but be creative 24/7, 365 days a year.

I am an artist & I make a living “making art”.

Sharing my tricks of the trade is something that I truly enjoy doing.

It is just a constant condition in our lives, maybe better described as an inescapable illness, if you please. I had a difficult time getting started in this career full time. There are no books on how-to do an artist life style in the libraries. Furthermore, my dad simply stated that, “You can’t make a living doing art, get a real job.” Consequentially I wasted time,  by spending many years pursuing normal work and hating it, sitting in a cubicle is about the worst torturous atmosphere I can imagine, to spend countless numbers of years of my life in. Maybe if a how-to book on how to become a successful artist was available, this could have been avoided.

What would be the title be for one of those self-help books about choosing the career of an “Artist”?

• Imagine… even when you don’t want to.
• Dreaming In Color?
• Artist fashions include paint stained clothes ?
• Shifting gears in a flash in color?
• Do you know, where the shadows go?
• Can’t Stop the Endless Flow of Ideas?
• Do you see creatures in the clouds

The most talented artists I have had the pleasure to spend time with were the ones who shared easily and happily with no-strings attached. Many times I have found that when requesting help from the artist community, it is not always freely or readily given, mainly because there is a lot of fear of competition and typical low self-confidence trait in many of my fellow artists. But, honestly, there is plenty of work out there for all of us.

There are no two of us the same

Each artist is very individual, having their own specific special style for their own brand of art. I have never seen a class-full of students paint the same scene and produce two images that were even remotely the same. Have you? Each artist sees things so differently.

As a classical breed, we have a well of spiritual imagination at our core. There is no need to fear that others will take what we have. It is truly a wasted effort to guard our own secret processes and worry about competition or theft of our creations. Most people would run away at a sprint, from where we happily receive a constant flow of ideas without pattern or rule.

Artists must have invented the term, “thinking out of the box”.

Heck, we not only think out of the box, we rarely even get onto a table to look into the box. Our minds are completely free spirits that only check into “other” normal realms when absolutely necessary. Daydreaming is a normal pastime for us and our creative imaginations work overtime quite frequently and because of this. We provide a wealth of creativity to our communities because we have an overflow of abundance in new ideas. Without our creative juices the locomotive or even electricity would never have been invented.

What steps go into making art?

This BLOG is setup to allow a way for me to share step-by-step images as I explain the “how-to’s” of being an artist.  I work through the creation process taking photographs of the progressive process.

Hopefully being able to see the steps I take to produce a project will help and inspire you into doing or completing your own.