Wildlife Artist Chris Shields

Chris Shields - Artist and Wildlife Illustrator, Graduated from Northwich College of Art and Design in 1973. He worked for nine years as a graphic artist, illustrator and designer in a commercial art studio and in 1983 left to become a freelance illustrator specializing in wildlife. Since then he has attained considerable international acclaim as a wildlife artist in both the publishing and fine art worlds, exhibiting paintings in Europe and the Far East and contributing illustrations to in excess of 300 books in several languages, also magazines, newspapers, greeting cards and posters. He is currently working on a major book commission for publishers Harper Collins due to be completed in 2009.

Until comparatively recently most of his work focused on wildlife and the natural world, creating highly detailed pictures painted in gouache and watercolour with traditional sable hair brushes - there are no computer generated images in his portfolio they are all real paintings done on real paper or canvas with real paint and real brushes!

Still passionate about nature and still producing highly detailed wildlife illustrations his work has now also taken a new direction creating much larger paintings of wildlife, nature and the human form. These new paintings are much larger then his previous works, they are painted in a more impressionist style and concentrate on mood and movement rather than detail. They are painted whilst standing at the easel, using pallet knives with acrylic on canvas or drawn in pastel on coarse textured water colour paper.

In order to produce finely detailed illustrations, Chris has to sit hunched very still over a desk for many hours at a time. Standing up at an easel however and painting on a large scale with no need to concentrate on any detail whatsoever Chris says - “It makes me feel like a real artist at last”.

The paintings you see here are just a small selection of Chris Shields' work. He will take private commissions and holds exhibitions regularly each year in the UK and in China.

In order to be added to his mailing list to receive invitations to future exhibitions please send an email with your details.

Please feel free to e-mail or telephone.