Welcome to My Art Site

I am a Christian, a wife and new stay-at-home mom in Pittsburgh, and I am so thankful for my husband who makes it possible for me to play with my son all day! I received a Bachelor of Arts degree in art and creative writing with concentrations in illustration and fiction at Carnegie Mellon. My experiences with the art department there were not conducive to thoughts of a career in the arts. With the pressures of creating abstract work, installations, multimedia pieces and other non-conventional forms of art behind me, there is now time (barring being a full-time mom) to get back to my first love-- Photorealism. My dream is to one day illustrate children's books, perhaps with the help of my children. Realistic children's book illustrations full of life and vibrant color have evoked something in me from the time I was a child. I sat in on my mother's art lessons at two and began all too many composition books with the words "Written and Illustrated by Kellie Michael," followed by blank pages.

I like to work from personal snapshots, especially of children captured in an intriguing moment of play or thought. Rather than being displayed in a photo album, it would be more appropriate to find my works in a sketchbook, thus, this site is named "Sketchbook Snapshots." My work is photo-realistic, drawn or painted with extreme attention to detail. I like for my pieces to be very personal for the viewer, for him or her to know the subject(s) or be a part of the scene. On this site, I hope to post my artwork, starting with some I did as early as fifth grade, up to the present. I work in several different mediums including oil paint, colored pencil, graphite pencil, Scratchboard and pen and ink as well as make my own artists books and do bookbinding and calligraphy. I have done several smaller scale murals (acrylic paint). The dry medium I do on either illustration board or a variety of heavy-duty Clayboard-- smooth, textured or black (Scratchboard). One last wish for this site is that it will keep me accountable for actually following through with the current pieces, in that I know I can post them here and maybe even receive some feedback from my fellow-artists.