Connie Resch

There have been so many inspirations along the way, some of the people who have inspired me from the past and modern times have been Emily Carr, Andrew Loomis, Teagan White, John James Audubon, Rachel Ignotofsky, Beatrix Potter, Paul Peel, Phillip Singer, Marc Burckhardt, Ernst Haeckel, to name a few, and lastly of course - my kids.

I wouldn’t say my creative process has evolved due to the industry so much as it has evolved on its own naturally. Lately, I have found my creative process to begin with photography rather than detailed sketches. I collect reference images all the time and find that I get a lot of creative ideas when I see a photograph. Often, I scroll through all of my collected photos to come up with an idea, and if I don’t have exactly what I need I take my own photographs!

I think it’s important for every creative to research and understand their rights when it comes to their intellectual property, legal rights & contracts, pricing standards in the industry, and generally know all you can about this business as early as you can. Some valuable lessons have been learning to protect myself and my work and also knowing when it’s appropriate to stand up for myself! Creatives provide so much value to the world but we are often overlooked or taken advantage of and unfortunately, we learn that the hard way.

My favorite projects are the ones where I am given creative free reign, where I can come up with a concept and execute it with the full trust of my client, knowing that I will deliver something good. That being said, my absolute favorite project right now would be a self-generated one where I literally purchased a taxidermy pigeon just to dress it up and create a fancy illustrated portrait of it.

I grew up in a small town in Canada, wasn’t exposed to much art and illustration beyond the art on our walls and the books and magazines available at the time, and actually went to school for Molecular Biology and had a career in the science field before moving to the USA. I always loved illustration and had been illustrating things since high school without even realizing it! Immigrating to the US, quitting my job, starting a family, and the pandemic all culminated in this change in course for me.

I love to draw and paint, but the most important thing is that I prefer to draw and paint for others to help them execute some sort of idea or vision. I have been helping people with their ideas or drawing things for friends since I could hold a pencil, if I had known early on that this could be considered Illustration I would have started a long time ago! I also get a huge sense of satisfaction when I take a creative project to completion and see it out in the world.

What tools do you use to create your art and illustrations?

I use a little of everything, and I probably have too many artist supplies. Some of the main tools I use are pencils, pastels, inks, acrylic paint, oil paint, watercolors, oil pastels and the list goes on. I also use digital tools like Photoshop to make a fully digital piece, edits to a traditional artwork, or to plan out an illustration and do a color study. If I'm doing an analogue piece I use a flatbed scanner or DSLR to get a good image of it.

Most people see technical precision itself as not being creative - but there is actually a lot of creative or artistic expression in the way a seemingly purely technical piece is conveyed. It can be from the choice of subject, the context, the addition or subtraction of elements, how it is presented etc. I balance my artistic expression with the technical work by making deliberate creative decisions and put a lot of thought into every piece - part of the magic of that is that the viewer might not even recognize that artistic choices have been made at all.