Community Spotlight: Amy Greening

Hi! I’m Amy or Amy1 (as you may know me from the Crowdcast chats). I live in Ontario, Canada and love giving back to my community. I volunteer with the Victorian Order of Nurses, my local chapter of the Alzheimer’s Society and I mentor for the Ontario Brain Injury Association. Most days you can find me reading a book or, in the summer, tending to my garden. For the first year ever, I am attempting to grow some herbs and vegetables.

I am well on my way to fulfilling the crazy cat lady persona with a total of four cats; Romulus, Remus, Freddie and Goosie. I’ve always loved music, so much so that I wanted to name my first cat KC and the Sunshine Band. My mom settled on just KC. Not long after we got him, I gave him a bath and he ran out of the house never to be seen again! I hope he found his Sunshine Band. Thankfully, I do have better luck with cats now. 

I enjoy constantly learning new things, so aside from art tutorials, I participate in many online courses aka MOOC’s (pronounced cow sound with a hard K). One of my favourite courses I have completed thus far is Dan Ariely’s “Beginner’s Guide to Irrational Behaviour.” I would recommend checking out his popular Ted Talk, “Are we in control of our own decisions?”

I purchased my iPad in 2019 and fell in love with using Procreate. By 2020, I began to search for new brushes beyond the standard ones in the program. At this point, I came across Design Cuts, then the pandemic hit, and thus, I purchased my first bundle. I knew that I would have more free time to explore and create and I was incredibly excited to learn more through the DC tutorials. I have now been a Design Cutter for approximately two years. Note to everyone reading this: you guys truly all feel like family and the tutorials and events are like the best family reunions. 

I would say that my interest in design began when I was a young girl and my mom would take me to work with her on weekends. She was an advertising sales representative at the local newspaper. I was kept occupied by looking through one of the huge books of stock images the paper had, cutting the images out, and gluing them to blank pages. Thus began my love for rubber cement (apparently Brits call it cow gum?) and design. In hindsight, I can also see how making my own rubber balls by painting the desk with rubber cement and rolling it into spheres exposed me to a strong solvent scent that very likely kept me enthused.

In school, my love for reading and drawing intertwined through the Scholastic Book Fairs. (Schools should also think about DIY rubber ball sessions, for their Amys. I’m kidding, don’t @ me!) I remember a time where I found a book that had grid drawings, where you try to copy the example art using a grid of boxes as a guideline. I thought this was very interesting and it could keep me entertained for hours. (Sidenote: I am noticing a theme of “the need to keep Amy occupied and supplying her with art activities” here). Even today, this technique has helped me to map out my drawings. By the time I was a teenager, I transferred the skills I learned of cut and paste and grid guidelines to doing layouts for the school yearbook. 

The thing that I love most about design is its freedom. Design provides this blank slate and never-ending fountain of ideas that are begging to be explored. I am able to connect with many other individuals that have this same passion for learning and creating. In this way, I feel it is very similar to music in the sense that what you produce speaks to people and even though you may not all speak the same language, everyone understands it in their own unique way.