FOUR-AND-A-HALF YEARS AGO, Nikolas Sealy decided to silence the nagging voice in his head that kept going on about drawing.
The owner of NS Designs by Nikolas Sealy is a self-taught pencil artist who likes drawing portraits of people and animals as well as wildlife, landscapes and surreal pieces.
But it was not always this way for Sealy, who studied autobody repairs at the Samuel Jackman Prescod Polytechnic after leaving Alexandra School. After graduating, he “did one or two jobs” in the field as he tried to earn a living.
Then the situation changed, he told BARBADOS BUSINESS AUTHORITY.
“I have a friend who does tattoos and I was hanging around him a lot and I would just be seeing the art form and it was nagging me, ‘you need to do something. You need to do something’.
“My wife Heather was telling me, ‘you’re wasting your talent, you need to do something with it’. Everyone was telling me ‘you could draw’ but honestly, I never saw it because I couldn’t draw a stickman properly, I just used to doodle a lot of foolishness.
“I tried drawing a portrait because I always had this thing about people’s faces. I was always saying I would love to draw somebody and I tried drawing my grandfather and I felt this thing was the best looking thing in the world.
“Looking back on it now, I should have thrown it away but I didn’t,” he said with a chuckle.
After that he got serious about art and scoured the Internet for portrait artists he could study to hone his craft.
“I studied a lot of realism. Photo realism, hyper realism and things like that, different expressions, what types of figures they leaned towards, like elderly people or children. I found that I liked the people that used to do elderly people…because their faces tell a story and I was drawn towards that. The wrinkles and the moles, everything,” he said.
Sealy explained that his portraits which he would do from pictures, are commissioned. He has not started live portraits yet but he would like to learn.
“These are mostly from overseas customers because while the locals want them, when you call a price, they don’t want to pay. Also, because I draw, a lot of people look at it as pencil art and have the notion that it’s a sketch that can be done in 15 minutes. I have to explain that the least amount of time that I take to do a portrait which is 11 by 14 inches is 40 to 50 hours in work.
“If I say painting, they want to pay, I don’t know why because all is art, just different mediums. My first love is pencil, black and white but I’m kind of going into colour now,” he said.
The decision to turn his drawings into a business came when he realised he had the talent.
“I started to see the progress and I started to really enjoy and get into it. Then, when I was looking at the other artists overseas and saw that they actually did this for a living, I said I could try it and make it into some sort of business and bring extra income.
“I decided to go the right road, register it and go from there. That was about two-and-a-half years ago,” he recalled.
Sealy is preparing to grow NS Designs, moving beyond the social networking sites Facebook and Instagram to a website where prospective clients can see and order his work. This, he added, was still a work in progress.
“This same time next year, I would love to learn [more], which is very hard for me to do because most of the courses are full-time. I would like to branch into graphic art. I really would love to learn graphic art but the real good courses are full-time and I have a full-time job,” he said.
He added: “By next year, I’m hoping to get my feet a little wetter in graphic art. I have done some but I would like to do the whole nine yards. It wouldn’t take away from my pencil portraits.”
Sealy has moved into printing his personal drawings, packaging them and offering them for sale. This is a market he is trying to get into, starting with a bird series to be followed with a series of flowers and then more birds, coming soon. (Green Bananas Media.)