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Lyndsey Selley

Do you love your job? Is it what you've always wanted to do? Well somebody who can definitely say yes to that question is Derbyshire artist Lyndsey Selley.

Lyndsey is a former illustrator and used to work as a figurine painter at Royal Crown Derby.

Lazy Days

But now she works for herself producing wonderful wildlife artwork and selling it around the world.

She's just opened her own gallery in Whaley Bridge and is currently showing her work in a new solo exhibition in Berkshire.

Her paintings feature a variety of beautiful animals in their natural habitats - from lions and tigers to bears and giraffes.

Lyndsey's paintings are painstakingly crafted by photographing the creatures several times, choosing the best shot, working through pencil drawings before eventually committing them to canvas.

She said: "We take hundreds of photos and then it'll literally be a case of going through them all and capturing that special element of one of them.

"For me it's often the eyes. I'm not particularly a landscape person, instead I like to capture essence of the animal and that's often in the eyes - it creates the mood.

Lyndsey Selley

"Then at the pencil stage, it's really important to me that I get a feel about how it's going to get painted - whether it's going to be very photographically tight or whether it's going to be loose and washy, with big brush strokes."

The hard work seems to be paying off. Since going full-time, Lyndsey has had her paintings published by Solomon and Whitehead and sold at the famous Christie's auctions.

In fact it was a recent sale in New York which helped fund her new Whaley Bridge gallery, named Java after a leopard who's been the subject of several paintings.

The lucrative purchase was of her painting 'Confusion at the Edge', a complicated work featuring zebras crossing a South African river which took more than a month to complete.

Confusion at the Edge

Lyndsey uses her gallery, which opened just two weeks ago to help support other artists and she also offers a bespoke framing service.

In addition she's also kept busy with regular solo exhibitions, the latest of which has just opened at the prestigious TG Art Gallery in Wokingham.

She said: "The solo exhibition features some new originals which have never been seen before.

"We usually set the exhibitions up ourselves but we decided to hold it there this time around because they've done so well selling my work over the past year."

Now she's looking forward to another safari trip to provide inspiration for more fabulous paintings.

You can see more of Lyndsey's work by visiting her website and use the audio links above to find out more about her.