Penny Lewin

Profile

Age: 37

Joined: Mar 2008

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I first studied Art and Design at Box Hill College of TAFE (Box Hill, Australia) in 1993-1994. Eventually I moved onto studying the Fine Arts further at Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) between 1995-1998. In recent times I have achieved a Bachelor of Teaching (Primary and Secondary) at Deakin University (Geelong), majoring in Visual Art education during 2001-2006.

I have always had a great passion for the visual arts since I was a young child and was either at school or home drawing pictures of the world in which I live. Colourful illustrations in children’s books were always a big influence in creating an illustration since I was a child. Some of my earliest memories of drawing was of myself sitting at my school desk inventing my own animal or human characters. Such characters often were depictions of lady white rabbits wearing blue eye shadow, red lipstick and swaying in hula skirts (hehe – Wish I still had those sketches).

Characters, such as Rupert the Bear or Beatrix Potter’s Peter Rabbit were big inspirations to many of my early artworks in high school. I had this huge desire when I left school to venture into the world of book illustrating and when I first began my art studies at Box Hill College of TAFE, I enrolled first year into some illustration classes. During my time at college, I first developed a white bull pit character named ‘Rover’ who always had a big white toothy grin on his face. At first Rover was a four legged dog, but over a period of time, Rover developed hands and feet (similar to Rupert the Bear).

While at TAFE, I slowly left my desire to become an illustrator and ventured towards the Fine Arts. Rover did appear within many of my early paintings during the early 1990’s, however near the end of my TAFE course and early years at RMIT, I leaned towards creating cartoon styled paintings of my art friends at RMIT, including cartoon styled paintings and drawings of self portraits. Personally I don’t think I ever really left my illustrative background and even in today’s artworks, my early interest in illustration still remains within my paintings and drawings. In recent times, my three dimentional sculptures too have taken on my illustrative elements.