Team Category: Instructors

Melissa has a BFA from Lake Erie College and has been teaching drawing, colored pencil, and oil and acrylic painting at the Dunedin Fine Art Center since 1990. She served the Colored Pencil Society of America for 12 years as Ways and Means Director and President; she is now CPSA corporate relations director and holds CPSA (fifteen-year) and CPX (five year) signature memberships. She is also a Signature Member and board member of the Miniature Artists of America, a board member of the Professional Association of Visual Artists, a member of the Florida Artist Group, and a member and past board member of the Miniature Art Society of Florida. Her artwork has been featured in multiple books on colored pencil, and she wrote a step-by-step article for The Artist’s Magazine (October 2012). Her artwork has been used in packaging, advertising and promotional materials for several companies and her paintings and drawings are in numerous corporate and private collections, including the Pencil Museum in Keswick, England.

Linda Benson trained at the Art Institute of Chicago and the American Academy of Art. Her 40-year career as a commercial artist and illustrator included working as an artist 20 years for the Chicago Tribune and as a graphic designer and manager for various Florida newspapers on the mainland and Key West. Linda’s hands-on teaching technique allows you to create along with her in the classroom.
With Linda you will enjoy being creative with transparent watercolors, her hands-on teaching technique allows you to create along with her in the classroom.

A Bachelor of Fine Arts from The College for Creative Studies (CCS), Julie Tibus has been professionally selling and showing her work for over 15 years and spent several years teaching at her own studios in Ann Arbor and Brighton, Michigan. Recently her desire for freedom has led to a life full-time on the road. Selling everything and traveling the USA, teaching and showing her art.. Julie has an insatiable
curiosity that leads her to explore emerging mediums and discover new techniques. Her work draws from an intersection of nature and her own bold expression of color. Teaching is how she shares her love of art with others.

ARTIST STATEMENT
My art is centered on the exploration of natural form and an uninhibited freedom to play. I begin with a loose thought (floral, landscape, color, pattern, shape) then move through the composition with an internal desire to free myself from laboring and instead lose myself completely to the process. I believe we all are creative and through art we can learn how to overcome the fear of comparison, the unknown, and expectations we impose on ourselves. My work is for the viewer to experience, contemplate and enjoy.