Tara Pople paints her way through the Eastside Arts Festival

The Vancouver painter is teaching two workshops at Luppolo Brewing Co. as part of the festival.

Get the best of Vancouver in your inbox, every Tuesday and Thursday. Sign up for our free newsletter. Growing up in Singapore, Tara Pople had artistic freedom.

“My mom was key to getting me into arts and crafts,” says Pople in an interview with the Straight at her East Vancouver studio. “She would let us paint the walls, paint our bedroom, just go crazy. And then she’d just paint over it.”

Pople eventually went with her family back to their home country in the U.K., where she went to a school that was heavily focused on academics. She found her way back to the arts, though. “I was addicted to painting, and so at lunchtime, or any break I had, I’d just be in the art room,” she says.

“My teachers thought that I would do art at university, but because it was a school that was very academic, they didn’t really tell me what I could do with it.” She ended up going to university for geography and archaeology, but a trip to Harry Potter World inspired a love for props. Her day job finds her at IRL Creative, the East Van company that has crafted props for movies and TV shows like Deadpool and Tron: Legacy.

But even still, the desire to paint her own creations has never subsided. Over a decade ago, she started a business on the side painting pet portraits. When she moved to Vancouver around eight years ago, she continued it on this side of the Atlantic and found a lot of demand.

“I loved it; it was really heartwarming,” says Pople, who had an entire series of dogs wearing bowties, among many other portraits. “There were a lot of dead pets, unfortunately, And I got a bit overwhelmed along the way, to be honest, with the number of submissions and stuff. I loved it, but it was very repetitive.”

More recently, Pople has been painting things like hummingbirds and flowers. And spreading her love of the medium like she spreads her brush across canvas. At last year’s Eastside Arts Festival, she acted as an assistant for fellow artist Megan Majewski.

“We did two events and I just fell in love with it,” says Pople. “It felt really natural.” In the meantime, Pople started teaching art classes in Tsawwassen.

So when she applied to the festival to teach sessions this year, it felt like a natural fit. Pople will be teaching two workshops at the festival, both at Strathcona’s Luppolo Brewing Co., on July 20 and 21. One will cover the technique of glazing, which is a layered effect that Pople uses on her hummingbirds.

“They look simple,” she says, “but the shading and the layering—I’m often waiting for the paint to dry to create other layers.” The hummingbird portraits have proven so popular with Vancouverites, often selling out craft fairs and markets, that Pople has now partnered with a couple of Vancouver photographers who take photos of the birds for her. The other workshop is focused on Pople’s plant portraits.

“It’s watercolour techniques, but observational skills as well for still life,” she says. “It’s teaching scaling and how you map out your page and everything that goes into doing little illustrations.” In other words, Pople is still painting everything in sight.

It just comes with a little more restraint than it used to. The Eastside Arts Festival runs July 17 to 26 across the Eastside Arts District.