Instruction

Ruth Collis has currently retired to the pleasant weather & inspiring beautiful town of the Pismo Beach area in California. Before this, she started out studying graphic design, which she thought might be the better stable approach to art. Receiving her AS degree, she designed websites, then found more meaning in pursuing the fine art side. From the start of her figurative style in loving long hair, Ruth's first sale as a career was an international sale, followed by more commissions from friends & family. As thicker acrylic pastes became available from manufacturers, Ruth found fascination with textures faster than they could be made.

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Inspiration

​Ruth is inspired to make her own free-form designs, but also sees how some coral life forms could be replicated with this thick paint and fun tools that would make it happen. She often uses cake decorating tips to achieve many of these sculpted forms. Other times a simple fork creates fascinating designs. Often it is most exciting to make up her own tools to create effects, like using a literal broom as the brush used in her painting called "Broomstick Tulips," or her own pastry tip that made these literal 3D Zebra Stripes. As an inventor, Ruth is inspired with manufacturers & their constant new improvements of paint & supplies she must try out.

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What events have shaped artistic direction?

Walking home from Junior High, Ruth saw this line of bubble gum stuck to the wall, but in all various colors. This was the first eye-opening to colors in dimension. Later during college burnout, she was inspired with this gum idea she remembered, and made a scene out of all the bubble gum colors she could find. This was the start of her interest in the 3D realm, but as the perishable item browned, she began trying many mediums with dimension.

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Then the paint world started their first productions of thicker paints where one day Ruth was ecstatic to discover an art manufacturer had made cake decorating tips screw on to the end of a paint tube. Their paint deflated & it phased out for years, leaving Ruth ahead of it's time and saddened at her tests, but she never forgot the exciting idea of dimension. Years went by and the thick paint was developed better by all paint manufacturers to hold peaks well. This has enabled creation of exciting endless 3D forms and that can be preserved archivally through the fine art medium of thick acrylic paint.

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A serious illness in 2011 & healing time off work led to furious testing of her dreams where she discovered a separate drying layer apart from the canvas would enable paint to be dried and shaped into a rose, then placed back in the canvas for immense sculptural effects.

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This led to her using thick built up palette paint, to be peeled off, rolled into a pipe shape that made these classy organ pipe coral forms. Over 12,000 students have signed up to learn how to do this in her online course.

 

She then started creating instructional templates for Squeeze Painting that others can do, followed by an explosion of techniques creating a multitude of thick paint styles including those items found on her paint Inventions page.

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What has influenced Ruth?

*Liquitex putting tips​ on a paint tube

*Cake decorations

*Affordable prices for the volume of thick paint needed for this style

*Beauty of California Central Coast

*Cool tools

*Broomstick brush size

*Classy environments and finer homes

*Lifestyle

*Ralph Lauren's standards of quality & design

*Seeing just the diversity of what this thick paint can do

*Wanting to see what something would look like in 3D paint

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Current work

Ruth finds all her discoveries can now be applied to many paintings at once and is excited to see how she can paint many orders of the same thing but make each uniquely different, such as a series of pipe corals, or tropical leaf sets that homes or businesses would want to display.

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Artistic Direction

Ruth Collis offers online video instruction for students, paints for the local homes in the Pismo Beach area, offers online purchasing for world-wide buying convenience, and plans to create art & garden exhibits for touring in the near future.

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What does Ruth's art do for others?

​​Ruth's work rotates every few months in the Art in Businesses program where many doctors & city officials have commented the dimension and color brightens up their place that ignites their imagination and they look forward to seeing the paintings.