Featured Artists

About Jacquie Boyd

Jacquie is an artist and illustrator born in Jarrow in the North East in 1965. Jacquie studied illustration and graphic design at Newcastle and Lincolnshire College of Art and Design in the mid 80s and began her working life as a visualiser and illustrator in the advertising industry in London, a busy job which taught her invaluable lessons about working to tight deadlines, and how to draw quickly.

Jacquie consequently worked in agencies in Edinburgh and Newcastle, moving back to her home town when she married. When her two boys were young, she concentrated on developing her own children's stories and freelance illustration work in greetings cards and editorial work.

She then spent ten years teaching Graphic Design and Illustration at Newcastle College of Art and Design, and began painting in 2002, finding immediate success with her iconic canvases in exhibitions in Newcastle.

Moving into her first studio in 2004 prompted her to leave teaching to concentrate on her personal fine art work alongside her more commercial work. She marketed her more commercial work through major trade fairs and gained regular customers through spaces at 'Psyche' in Middlesborough, 'The Biscuit Factory' in Newcastle, 'Off the Wall' in Dublin, 'Customs House' in South Shields, and 'Pierre Garroudi, Design Me, and My Floating World' in London.

She has since enjoyed developing her style and fine art practice, commercial illustration work for advertising and does regular educational workshops and art projects with local school children, and has had successful exhibitions in London and the north.

Her first solo multimedia show in the summer of 2008 'The Jack That Didn't Fit in the Box' in the North East led to great critical acclaim, a show in which she examined her own childhood, teenage obsessions and effects of religious routines, through a collection of oil paintings, mixed media box sculptures, video and a stunning installation using over 300 hundred teenage dolls loaned by the public.

In 2009 Jacquie Boyd held an exhibition entitled The Second Dimension. This was held at the Coningsby Gallery and showcased a collection of Jacquie's latest works in Winsor & Newton Galeria Acrylics. This vibrant body of work was influenced by the dramatic drawing styles in retro teenage comics fused with her comments on the superficiality of life in the 21st century.

Jacquie Boyd's Work

Jacquie's styles are very much influenced by the working methods of her early career; her time in advertising was at the tail end of the era of magic markers, gouache and hand lettering. She loves working in acrylics which she likens to those old school graphic techniques and she also works in oils, and loves their flexibility and depth. Jacquie loves a 'hands-on' approach and traditional methods of producing imagery.

She takes her influences from the dramatic drawing styles in retro teenage comics which she fuses with comments on everyday life and the superficiality of life in the 21st century, finding subject matter all around in our celebrity obsessed culture: "Coming from a commercial background, working across editorial and advertising illustration through to my fine art practice, I have always been required to use a variety of media, and have always used Winsor & Newton products across the board simply because nothing else compares to them."

For Jacquie's acrylic work, she produces colour roughs which are transferred onto canvas. Using Winsor & Newton Galeria acrylics, she starts with the lightest areas first and then waters the medium down slightly to a kind of 'full fat milk' consistency and works in layers.

As a graphic student in the 80s, she was taught how to use Designer's Gouache for flat washes, a technique she has carried on using in her illustration work. "I started my comic based paintings a couple of years ago and I naturally slipped into my old technique of painting in a very flat smooth method, which I tend to do with oils too. People often don't believe that my acrylic paintings are actually 'painted' and think they're prints. I find it a challenge to see how dense and flat I can get a colour to be on these paintings, so they are as close as I can get to a print finish and the Galeria paints are perfect for this."

Jacquie also uses Winsor & Newton gouache when she is required to produce a comic style illustration for editorial work. Her illustration work is naturally a lot smaller in size to her acrylic paintings on canvas and the gouache is a perfect consistency to achieve a perfectly flat print like finish, using the same techniques she uses with acrylics.

Jacquie uses Winsor & Newton Oils for her personal work.

Jacquie Boyd uses Winsor & Newton because

"I absolutely love the depth and richness of colour that can be achieved and the flexibility oils give me, having been used to fairly merciless media that could not be altered. Had I known how flexible oils were I would have tried them long ago. I am a little bit obsessed with W&N Indigo... I have actually started a whole range of images painted solely in indigo and white. I love it!"

"I have very recently discovered the Griffin Fast Drying Oils range ...and haven't stopped raving about them to everybody I know! ... I tried the fast drying oils and have been amazed not just at the speed of the drying time but at their flexibility and colour depth. Instead of waiting for weeks to dry, my illustrations were ready to scan for print overnight."