- Hello, I'm Beth McMillan and welcome to Arteffects.

For our first segment, meet artist, Sarah Renee.

Sarah creates fantastical art of creatures, big and small.

Each animal has extraordinary de and maybe a few extra legs or ey Let's meet some of these magical and learn more about Sarah.

(upbeat music) - The kind of art I create, I would call it more creature-based or creature desig (upbeat music) It definitely will come from a love of animals, I don't do a lot of animals as t Maybe put a twist on them and what happens if I add anothe What happens if I give that bear I don't know, just the, you know you're mixing and matching or just completely creating some Something that isn't part of thi something completely different.

My name's Sarah.

I go by Sarah Renee and I do a lot of fantasy illustration design, both digital and acrylic mediums If we wanna go all the way back to childhood, you know, doing little doodles all the way up till now.

I've been doing it for majority of my life.

I was introduced to a lot of older fantasy films and one that had stood out for m was a movie called "The Dark Cry You know, a lot of people though "Oh, this was, you know, this is What are these creatures?"

And I was fascinated, just absolutely fascinated.

And so ever since then, all those kind of things have really inspired me to kind of take a twist on normal everyday things, creat and make it maybe a little bit w a little bit more fantasy.

That was definitely like the one point where I realized, "Oh, this fantasy kind of thing definitely a part of me."

(gentle music) So for the longest time, I have stuck to acrylic.

Acrylic is my love.

More recently, within the last four or five years, I've gotten into digital medium and that has created almost a whole new style.

My acrylic paintings and my digital pieces are very different from each other.

With my digital, I like to do very heavy line work, very detailed, while the acrylic may be more blocky.

So the difference between, say, my acrylic paintings and the digital with the acrylic on canvas, it's right here physically in fr With all my digital pieces, it's drawn essentially on a computer or any other device.

And I can upload that either directly to the internet or to website or print them out to be able to have copies that w I have this love for, you know, and it sounds very silly, the smell of canvas, the smell of paint, just the physical aspect of it, that really the digital can't compete with to me.

And that's just personal preference completely.

It kind of depends on what the end of goal is for me.

What am I looking to do?

Am I looking to hang in a galler Am I looking to make stickers?

And you can still do either with (upbeat music) I really enjoy creating the entire environment, providing a feel for the paintin It can be that deep or sometimes it's just mindless.

Sometimes I just want to create there's no thought behind it (ch And just going for more emotion I don't normally sketch out the entirety of the painting 'cause I want some things to evo as they're being created.

And so I'll usually do one base of what shape that subject is gonna be taking.

And from there I usually save that to last.

I will create kind of the enviro the world behind it, slowly, again, I'm gonna add those layers in bit by bit.

I like as I go along, adding certain things, oh wait a minute, let's put that, what if we did that?

I could take it out if it doesn' And so that's half the fun, I think for sure.

(upbeat music) (gentle music) It is my absolute favorite thing to be doing because I still do, you know, our nine to five job and whether I am getting ready f and you know, I'm planning to bring those paintings with me to potentially sell.

That is not like a job to me sitting there in paintings.

Sometimes I will treat paintings as if it were a sketchbook where you're just hashing them o and you wanna see what comes out, get ideas.

It brings me the utmost joy.

(gentle music) The responses I'll get from my artwork are, they can be mixed.

Usually nothing necessarily nega One of my bigger pieces was a sn with 10 eyes and blue roses.

And for some people that's, "What is that?"

I remember they were whispering, "Why does it have 10 eyes?"

I'm like, "Just because it can, just because it does."

And so sometimes it'll be responses like that, "that's kind of weird."

Or people are like, "Oh my gosh, this looks like this."

Or like, "How did you think of t I'm like, "I have no idea, it is what it is."

And so it's really exciting to talk to some people when I do show my pieces locally and actually get to meet face to face with some people.

And we kind of talk about like what that reminds them of or what they think it is.

And that's one of the best parts is what they interpret it as.

And it's usually something I never thought of.

And I love to hear what they are I enjoy the fact that my paintin and what I hope it does for peop challenge imagination just a lit 'cause I like to stretch that imagination just ever so much.

(gentle music) - [Announcer] Funding for Arteffects is made possible by, Sandy Raffealli with Bill Pearce Motors, Meg and Dillard Myers, in memory of Sue McDowell, The Carol Franc Buck Foundation, Chris and Parky May and by the annual contributions of PBS Reno members.

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