Sue Costar

Sue has painted and drawn since she was a young child. Winning the school painting competition encouraged her to take art more seriously, so after leaving school she went straight to Croydon College of Art where she completed a three-year, full-time course studying graphics and illustration. There she was lucky to count Alan Jones, Quintin Blake, Charles Keeping and Clifford Frith among her tutors. While wanting to just paint, parental pressure steered her into the field of commercial art in order to bring home a guaranteed wage.

For 40 years she worked in various design studios and advertising agencies producing all manner of works for print and display, including airbrushing, retouching, type mark-ups, presentation roughs and finished artwork and illustration. Her final 21 years were spent designing and producing specialist magazines, including ‘The Automobile’, ‘Jaguar World’, ‘Balloons and Airships’, ‘Tractor & Machinery’, ‘Stationary Engine’, ‘The Actuary’ and ‘Farm and Horticultural Equipment Collector’.

Her job involved a great deal of overtime and working under pressure to meet deadlines so hobbies had to take a back seat for a great deal of the time. It was only after retirement that she was able to devote more time to painting.

She produced the illustrations for Ken Law’s book ‘Woman at The Wheel’ and took a diploma course in cartooning with the International Correspondence School. She mainly paints in oil and gouache and is happy to tackle any subject.