Featured Artist: Christy DeKoning

Christy DeKon­ing grew up in Syd­ney, Aus­tralia. With for­mal train­ing in singing and clas­si­cal bal­let, Christy worked as a vocal­ist on the Van­cou­ver music scene in the early 90’s, and then as a Cer­ti­fied Makeup Artist for sev­eral years before finally con­cen­trat­ing her career in Fine Arts.

In the past sev­eral years, Christy has com­pleted over 200 com­mis­sioned water­color por­traits for clients world­wide. Christy now lives in South­west­ern Ontario, Canada with her hus­band, two sons, two cats and a back­yard full of squir­rels (but no mice!).

Her art­work has been fea­tured in ACEO Mag­a­zine, and on Bound­less Gallery. You can also view Christy’s work at Art­Fire, Flikr, Face­book and IndiePublic!

Christy started draw­ing por­traits in graphite, and had painted in acrylic with not much suc­cess before try­ing my hand at water­color - it’s been her favorite medium since, and now that she has a cer­tain famil­iar­ity with it, a com­fort level if you will, she is work­ing at improv­ing my tech­niques with water­color instead of dab­bling with other mediums.

She has always drawn peo­ple, for as long as she can remem­ber. Even­tu­ally peo­ple started ask­ing her to paint por­traits of their

houses, fam­ily mem­bers, pets…the busi­ness just grew from word-of-mouth.

Where does your inspi­ra­tion come from?

My inspi­ra­tion comes from sev­eral artists, mostly con­tem­po­rary. Artis Lane has been a great source of inspi­ra­tion for me. Mar­garet M. Mar­tin was my first “favorite water­color artist” because her paint­ings were so col­or­ful and dynamic.

How has your art evolved over time?

I feel my por­traits have become “cleaner” since I started using water­color. I’ve learned how to use color in dif­fer­ent ways, and now I can keep a por­trait fresh and clean from the start to fin­ish, whereas when I started — it got a lit­tle muddy from over-working or choos­ing the wrong col­ors.