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Creston artist breathes life into wildlife drawings

It isn’t often that one can look at a pencil drawing of an animal and recognize an expression of feeling, maybe sadness or joy...
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Creston artist Guy Hobbs’ dog

Guy Hobbs has the rare gift of bringing facial expression, even emotion, into his animal drawings. It isn’t often that one can look at a pencil drawing of an animal and recognize an expression of feeling, maybe sadness or joy.

Looking at Hobbs’ pencil drawing of his greyhound, Mo, one has to blink twice as the subject becomes alive. The texture of the inside of Mo’s ear, the expression in the dog’s eyes and the softness of the fur on the ears are so real you can almost touch it through your eyes. This is multi-dimensional wildlife drawing at its best.

Hobbs, who will share his drawing skills in a three-day art seminar offered this summer at the College of the Rockies, grew up in Southeast England. He took art training, specialising in design, later moving into abstract. For the next 21 years he enjoyed a successful career in design, yet he always felt a passion for the outdoors.

Since a child, he has been a wildlife enthusiast. He watched zoo animals, as well as those in the wild, and became fascinated by the big difference in behaviour, movement and expression. Eventually he became so interested in recording animals in the wild expressing their visceral reactions to the natural world, he began spending more time outside drawing them. This connection, which took him to a much deeper level of himself and his art, was more exciting and fulfilling. It took him beyond the thrills of designing for the fast-paced economy, to a greater level of sensitivity and peace. Now, each day is a new learning experience, a gift.

It was Hobbs’ wife, Kerry, who encouraged him to combine his passion for wildlife with his artistic training, and has been very supportive in helping him make the switch from design artist to wildlife artist. Once he made the decision to switch careers, he discovered himself as a different person. It was challenging to change his beliefs about work.

“Spending time outside drawing and watching animals and birds just doesn’t feel like work when it comes from the heart, instead of from trained techniques,” said the Creston Valley resident, whose art is displayed in various places round the West Kootenay.

Now he enjoys spending a couple of days sitting in a swamp with his camera, then three days choosing which picture to draw. With tongue in cheek, he said he “took up wildlife art to cover up his mediocre wildlife photography.”

Although he has worked entirely in pencil, using Derwent graphite pencils, he progressed to adding wax-based colour pencils. He says the learning curve is endless. He first began drawing with pencil at school, and it has become his love, providing better control for detail.

“One has to have an element of obsessive/compulsiveness to get all the detail in wildlife drawing,” he laughingly commented. “It was a huge step moving to colour. There is so much to learn about pencils.”

Hobbs claims he was never taught to draw wildlife, and has learned by observation so he was not constrained. He is always interested in the work of other wildlife pencil artists, because each drawing is unique in its learning.

He describes how he spent hours learning how to create the luminescence of colour on a hummingbird by watching the movement of individual feathers as the bird flashes its iridescence when excited.

Each season brings its own fascination, and he is discovering his paradise in Lister. He works mainly from photos displayed on his computer to provide better detail. His designing background influences his picture composition, regarded by some as unconventional.

Recently he has been working with an airbrush technique that opens up new dimensions. The birds almost lift off the page as they look intensely at the observer, and one can almost stroke their feathers. The details are added after the airbrush work with acrylic paint and pencil.

He also uses the airbrush to soften the background to his animals or birds in the same way a photographer uses his focal length to blur the background in a photo.

Hobbs is also involved in the creation of marketing material to facilitate good communication and a sense of community between businesses and new employees.

Throughout the world there is a low working population and it is essential to import workers and increase immigration. It is vital to help those people moving from another country or another part of this vast land to adjust smoothly to the culture and ways of living in their new home. This factor is important to creating safety and harmony for new families facing different language, customs, food, traditions, social behaviour and climate. It can be difficult, even for a Canadian moving across his own country, to settle in a community where the way of life may be totally different. Employers too need to recognize and help new immigrants or migrants how to fit in socially and as workers.

This exciting project will necessarily involve a lot of visual information to make ideas and concepts easy to understand. Artistic and design skills are an essential ingredient to its success.