Where art, nature, and rock music blend - Patrycja Pacholska
An artist who found her happy place in animals, nature, and 80s rock music. Meet Patrycja Pacholska, the amazing animal portrait artist from Poland. She is a Journalism & Social Communication student at the University of Rzeszów in Poland. Talking about the genre of art she specializes in, she says she has a thing for realism. She has been a great fan of artists who share their wonderful realistic wildlife artworks and has always aspired to be as good as them. Patrycja thinks that her work has not reached that level of perfection yet, but she is pretty happy with them and is driven to work on her skills.
When it comes to the tools she uses, she searches for paper with the smoothest texture possible and a grammage of 220 gsm and above. Patrycja specializes in colored and graphite pencils. Her favorite colored pencils are Faber-Castell Polychromos, Holbein, and Caran d'ache Pablo/Luminance. Although she uses pencils from other brands like Prismacolor, Derwent, Uni Mitsubishi, or Castle Arts, she has her personal favorites and she uses them the most. When she works on the whiskers or white hairs in the portraits, her favorites are ceramic knives from Slice and embossing tools. Sometimes, she uses PanPastels to cover larger areas of each color and corrects it with colored pencils but she says that it's a rarity.
Patrycja has always loved to draw from when she was a child. She started off by drawing cats and her favorite rock musicians. She says that she still has her old drawings hidden in 3 fully loaded folders. As a child, she always preferred staying indoors and drawing, and whenever her friends would call her to get out and play, she would tell them she did not feel like going out. She found so much fun and companionship in the act of drawing. Even now, she can spend all day drawing. She also loves taking long walks, especially when it's sunny and warm outside. But drawing still tops her list of the most favorite things to do.
When asked what was her inspiration to choose animal portraits, she says that she has always been passionate about wildlife, especially big cats. She just blended her passion for both drawing and animals, and the result was a series of portraits inspired by her favorite photos of animals which she stumbled upon on the internet. While drawing, she puts on her headphones and listens to some music that reminds her of wildlife. It makes her feel like she is somewhere in the wildlife area of Africa or Alaska. She also draws her inspiration from the work of the animal portrait artists she finds on social media, which has motivated her to work on her skills and level up like them. She recounts a day from the summer holidays in 2019 when she was in her room and was mighty inspired to draw like one of those artists. She grabbed a sheet of paper, colored Faber-Castell pencils, and drew a portrait of a leopard hidden between leaves, and another portrait of one of her cats. That was just the beginning. Since then, she has drawn on a regular basis almost every day, and she absolutely loves doing it.
Patrycja says that her life as an artist has been a pretty smooth one without any big challenges. She enjoys the process of working on each drawing and she shares them on her Instagram and Facebook accounts. She is aware that a lot of people care about the ranges and algorithms. But she is from an entirely different league. She doesn’t care too much about that, and when she posts her work, she just shares it, quits the app, and totally forgets about it. She always focuses on the best and most important part of being an artist - the process of drawing which gives her immense joy and satisfaction. She believes that it should be the most important part of work for every artist.
For Patrycja, inspiration comes from other artists, from herself, or from the pictures she sees on the internet. She mostly derives inspiration from the pictures, and sometimes she finds ideas coming straight from her head. She strives to make her work look better every day, and she believes that the best way to achieve progress is to practice, practice and practice.
For her, success is when she achieves goals, but it doesn't mean that every achievement has to be big. It can be even the littlest ones. If we learn to notice small things and be grateful for them we will achieve more and more of them. She believes that it's pure physics.
Apart from art, Patrycja is passionate about music. She is a die-hard fan of 80s and early 90s music. Her dad is an Iron Maiden fan and he would play her their songs all the time when she was a child. She loves the band, and she loves playing the guitar and singing along. She also loves nature and cats.
The advice that Patrycja would like to give aspiring artists is to be confident in their art journey. Do not put pressure on yourself. Work at your own pace and work regularly. Let the process of creating your artwork be a pleasure to you. If you do what you love and make yourself happy, you'll be successful - says Patrycja.