Wayne Henley is a UK based artist who specialises in highly detailed realistic art work.
In June 2016, after finding himself at a loose end in an art shop with the desire to commemorate the birth of his first grandchild, Wayne discovered his talent for hyper-realistic drawings. After this initial drawing of his grandson, he quickly received interest from friends and family for their own personal drawings.
Since then, Wayne has cultivated a social media following of over 3,000 people and his work has gained the interest of the local and global publications. He has completed art for clients across the globe, with commissions destined for locations such as USA and his prints being picked up all across the globe with his main markets being UK, USA and Australia.
In 2018, he was contacted to create a piece commemorating the 50th anniversary of the classic film, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. The original piece is owned by David Walliams, who is currently stars on Britain’s Got Talent, and legendary hollywood actor actor Dick Van Dyke picked up a copy of the commemorative artwork too.
Wayne has had a lifelong interest in sports, particularly football and Formula 1, which quickly became the main inspiration for his work.
He prides himself on being a perfectionist and it takes Wayne, on average is work takes between 100 – 200 hours to complete.
After starting out with just graphite drawings Wayne had an interest to add colour so advanced to use colour pencils too.
While drawing he enjoyed colour work more and so it felt like a natural progression was to move over to paints.
So Wayne created a few test paintings from 2017 but decided to stick to drawings a while longer.
Then in December 2019 he decided to do an all or nothing painting, it was to be on 120x100cm canvas and in oil.
Timing are everything and this felt like the right time and place, the piece can be seen on www.wjhenley.art and it is called Gladiators featuring Nigel Mansell giving a lift back to the pits on the 1991 British grand prix.
This was so successful in terms of the reception it got but also from the experience of working with paints that the original was purchased by a collector in Canada, and from that day Way has only produced paintings.