Leo Buckley

Maintaining a role as a working artist, even when his full time

occupation was of a professional engineer, proved to be a sound

investment for Leo Buckley.

Retired through ill health, he soon found that his interest in art was an essential part of his recovery.

Born in The U.K. his drawings were well broadcast and highly acclaimed in his home country and Europe. When he became a resident of Australia in 1984 his drawings of Australian topics soon became popular in this country also.

Being well retired and not wishing any stress, he has resisted

commercial pressures to exploit his talent; However, selling at occasional craft markets more for fun than profit, his work still finds its way to all countries in the world.

He works and teaches out of his studio at Gembrook in the Dandenong hills of Victoria.

His greatest pleasure, still, is in successfully teaching people to draw.

To view some of his work, visit http://www.gembrook.com.au

As a working artist, Leo Buckley was invited to talk to the sixth grade of a local primary school.

The resulting question and answer session revealed an enormous appetite of the students for some simple rules to enable them to improve their drawing abilities.

They had been unable to find this information, at their level, in any book in the bookshops; saying that the only available books either assumed knowledge which they did not have, or else treated the topics so briefly as to be scarcely helpful.

As result, Leo returned with a few instructive talks on some of the basic principles of drawing.

Using feedback from the pupils and teachers, the talks were developed into a fairly comprehensive series on the subject which soon become in great demand by other schools.

For many years after, Leo presented the talks to schools covering a wide variety of schools and pupils and, eventually, including adult classes.

Throughout this extended period the lessons were modified, adjusted in contents and rearranged into the most logical sequence to better suit the need of this widening range of students.

At the frequent request of teachers and students (of all age groups) Leo examined the possibility of compiling a book which would follow the successful pattern of his lectures; even to the extent of displaying the illustrations and text on opposite pages as in a "chalk and talk" classroom environment.

This innovative (and easy to follow) method simplified the presentation enormously and he found that the lectures almost immediately fell into book form.

The result was "DRAWING IS FUN"; who's success can be measured by the fact it has now reached it's third edition and is still going strong