Janet Keen

I am an artist and teacher of Mosaics, Acrylic Painting, Nature Photography and Mixed Media. I teach children in after school classes from ages 5 to 16 from my home studio/classroom in Rotorua, New Zealand. I also occasionally facilitate simple mural making projects and pop art animal painting workshops in primary schools. I teach adults on Monday mornings, a variety of classes in mosaic, acrylic painting and mixed media painting. I prefer the naive and illustrative styles. I love Mexican and Spanish work and folk art from European countries. I like to go adventuring stylistically into overseas countries. In my mind I'm not even here in New Zealand, I am having adventures in far away places. My journal work often depicts girls and animals going away on adventures into imaginary places. I love fairy tales, walking in nature, cooking, writing poetry (Japanese haiku) and playing the piano and classical guitar. I am looking forward to these illustration courses because much of the work is spontaneous, bright and free.
For many years I have wanted to write and illustrate children's books and to make a book with all the lessons that I teach as a visual manual for my students. I have begun many times but have never followed through because I have been involved with lots of other projects.I have a huge collection of beautifully illustrated children's books that I have collected since 1986. I have a collection of black and white images that I want to hand colour and attach haiku to and a have a few examples on my blog. I decided to take these Domestika courses in order to build up my skill level in water colour, gouache and drawing. I want to obtain some inspiration and have some fun. I see this creative time that I will be spending on this course as nourishment. I would love to go on an art retreat in Mexico, but this is about as close as I am going to get with covid. I would also like to set my illustrations up more professionally on social media and on a decent website and to master procreate, illustrator and photoshop. When I have finished these six courses I would like to enrol in some computer classes towards this end. I have also been trying to write an illustrated book of poetry for the past 15 years and I am hoping that I will obtain some inspiration from these courses to do it. Thank you for the opportunity.