About Me……..

 

My name is Peggy Henderson, and I am a full-time stay-at-home mom. I live in southern California with my husband and two sons. We have six horses, six cats, two dogs, two goats, and various chickens that keep us quite busy. I am active in my sons’ classrooms, as well as with cubscouts, soccer, and karate. My personal interests include dressage and (of course) painting. Before being blessed with motherhood, I was a full-time veterinary technician for twelve years.

I am a self-taught artist and have been selling my work and offering commissioned pet portraits since 1999. My subjects are always animals – I love painting horses, dogs, and cats. I strive for realism in my subjects and my focus is on bringing out each subject’s individual, unique personality. I work mostly with graphite pencils and acrylic paints, but I have also done work in oil and pastels.

 

When I originally started out teaching myself to draw/paint, I started with charcoal pencils. From there I progressed to pastels and then acrylics. I later discovered that I like graphite pencils better than charcoal for my drawings.

 

All my graphite drawings are done on heavy (100 lb) vellum Bristol board, and sprayed with a fixative upon completion to keep it from smudging. Graphite drawings lend themselves to incredible detail and a very realistic likeness.

 

Acrylics is my favorite painting medium. All my acrylics are painted on canvas for that "traditional" painting look. They require less time than oils, because the drying time of an acrylic is very fast. I can often complete a painting within a couple of days, even when I need to apply multiple layers of color (in fact, most of my acrylic paintings have at least six layers, and more often than not more than ten layers of color from start to finish).