Art teacher uses colorful paint to enhance pet photos : Acadiana Makers
3 min read [ad_1]
Kelly deClouet sits at a table in her kitchen laid out with everything she’ll need for the evening — blank canvas, paintbrushes and a rainbow of acrylic paints.
She will work diligently over the next few weeks to paint not only a portrait of a poodle or bulldog, but to paint your poodle or bulldog.
She lays down layer after layer of tiny paint strokes to capture the personality of her customers’ beloved pets, each painting becoming a colorful keepsake or a memorial of an animal that has crossed the rainbow bridge.
“What I’ve learned in art is that an eighth of an inch makes a difference,” deClouet said. “It turns the animal into who it is.”
The North Vermilion High art teacher feels the pressure to capture the animal’s essence, especially when it is a painting of someone’s late pet.
“It has to look exactly like their dog,” she said. “Eyes take me the longest. It won’t be right, and I’ll make a little tiny stroke somewhere and that’s it. They’ll say, ‘Oh my god, it’s him.'”
Success.
Creating depth with colors
DeClouet, 51, has taught art for 24 years, spending the last 17 at North Vermilion in Maurice.
“I love my job,” she said. “I have no problem getting up at 5:30 to get to school at 6:30. Sometimes I’m even excited to go to school.”
And when she’s not creating art in the classroom, she’s creating it at her kitchen table in Youngsville. Several years ago she’d started taking apart and painting wooden pallets as well as painting on canvas, creating a side business called Pallets and Palettes LLC.
She took orders and sold through Facebook, and in 2018 someone asked her to paint an animal in a style that fit her own. She loves the bright colors and dreamy brush strokes of Van Gogh and Gustav Klimt, and she thought she could bring that to these projects, making herself and her customers happy.
“They want something different,” she said. “It’s not realistic.”
She did her first pet painting in 2018, and the rest is history. Now she’s made hundreds.
More Acadiana Makers:Lafayette mom creates custom tumblers, T-shirts in her specialty business | The man behind Nonc’s Shop brings Louisiana wood and its stories to life
DeClouet has seen her style evolve over the last four years. She can look back on her first few and see skinny, hesitant strokes, compared to the broader strokes she comfortably paints today.
She’s grown comfortable with this medium but still finds challenges in new projects.
“It’s more about using the right colors to create depth and then little tiny things that make the pet unique,” she said.
‘You can do what you love’
Customers send her photos of their pet to work from, most of them cats or dogs. But she has been asked to paint birds, chickens, llamas and giraffes in the bold, lined style.
She’ll work on several at a time, maximizing drying time and her “free” time after a full day of work. Sometimes she brings her projects into the classroom, showing her art students how she creates this look.
“The kids get so excited,” she said. “It shows them you can make money with art and do what you love.”
DeClouet studied advertising and design at the University of Southwestern Louisiana, now the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, and her experiences with different media and lessons on composition continue to come in handy, both in the classroom and at her kitchen table.
She prefers to work in her kitchen, where she can also watch TV, cook or entertain friends as she hand-paints line after line to create a tangible picture that looks like it was put through a digital filter.
“I like to be where the people are, not shut up in a shop,” she said.
Contact children’s issues reporter Leigh Guidry at [email protected] or on Twitter @LeighGGuidry.
[ad_2]
Source link
