Posts tagged illustration

by Janice Wu My work explores how meaning, value, and associations are placed upon things in the material realm. I am interested in how seemingly worthless objects have the potential for whimsy and how the ‘inanimate’ mundane can reveal poetic and narrative possibilities. Through re-imagining the mediocre, the ordinary can become playful and even precious. Working meticulously in pencil and watercolor, my drawings reveal the intricate, tender nature of this medium and reflect the notion of devoting time and contemplation in to the easily overlooked. Through this process of investigating the quotidian, I train my looking practice towards observing the subtleties in my own lived experiences. My curiosity also lies in what kind of ethnographic experiences I can construct through my work. By studying personal material cultures, I hope to reveal understandings or realizations, large or small, of shared human experiences.

by Janice Wu

My work explores how meaning, value, and associations are placed upon things in the material realm. I am interested in how seemingly worthless objects have the potential for whimsy and how the ‘inanimate’ mundane can reveal poetic and narrative possibilities. Through re-imagining the mediocre, the ordinary can become playful and even precious. Working meticulously in pencil and watercolor, my drawings reveal the intricate, tender nature of this medium and reflect the notion of devoting time and contemplation in to the easily overlooked. Through this process of investigating the quotidian, I train my looking practice towards observing the subtleties in my own lived experiences. My curiosity also lies in what kind of ethnographic experiences I can construct through my work. By studying personal material cultures, I hope to reveal understandings or realizations, large or small, of shared human experiences.

by Luis Dourado My creation process it´s pretty much free, even though I usually explore the same themes and similar atmospheres with different visual results. I don´t see any point in exploring always the same directions so I´ve been pretty much jumping from series to series. Still, the themes that I work with are pretty much always related to each other, I mean, series are somehow connected, even if this relation only come up clearly to me after a year, but for me as an artist, in the end it always makes sense. I´ve always been a nostalgic person, always intrigued with time and memory and probably that´s what connects points.I do not follow any kind of rule or method and does not make sense for me (at least right now) to be only focused on one platform, like digital, analogue, etc. I might be a couple of months only collecting information, images, getting stimulated and then come up with two or three different series but the whole process is very natural somehow, I love and I also panic with this idea of randomness, that I´m actually not 100% controlling my own work, that “he” decides when to come up somehow.

by Luis Dourado

My creation process it´s pretty much free, even though I usually explore the same themes and similar atmospheres with different visual results. I don´t see any point in exploring always the same directions so I´ve been pretty much jumping from series to series. Still, the themes that I work with are pretty much always related to each other, I mean, series are somehow connected, even if this relation only come up clearly to me after a year, but for me as an artist, in the end it always makes sense. I´ve always been a nostalgic person, always intrigued with time and memory and probably that´s what connects points.I do not follow any kind of rule or method and does not make sense for me (at least right now) to be only focused on one platform, like digital, analogue, etc. I might be a couple of months only collecting information, images, getting stimulated and then come up with two or three different series but the whole process is very natural somehow, I love and I also panic with this idea of randomness, that I´m actually not 100% controlling my own work, that “he” decides when to come up somehow.

by Chris Berens When I was a boy, my father brought me to many exhibitions of the Dutch Golden Age painters, including Frans Hals, Rembrandt and Vermeer, and those images became infused into the internal world he began imagining as a child. He studied illustration at the Academy of Art and Design in Den Bosch, graduating in 1999. While working as a freelance illustrator, I began to teach myself to paint in several dilapidated buildings in the rural area near my childhood home. Attempting to emulate the painting methods of the Old Masters and 19th-century academic artists like Ingres and Bouguereau, I learned by copying their work, and eventually came upon a technique which allowed me to achieve an otherwordly dreamlike impression of the qualities I admired in my predecessors.  My technique is not one I at one time ‘made up’. I tried thousands of things and combine the ones that work for me. It is not an isolated technique. It took me 8 years to get to the tecnical point where I am now and it is still very much evolving and will probably be completely different again in a couple of years. The particular ink, paper, brushes, water, varnish, laquers, glue and panels I use happen to work for me for now. And I like to keep that particular information to myself as it is useful only to me.So don’t get hung up on the technique too much. It’s just ink and paper. It’s no magic ink. Or magic paper. I try and find my own language in imagery, as in my opinon it all comes from gesture -being the aesthetic of the brushstrokes and their emotional impact- your imagination and trying to stay true to yourself. When images come from deep within, they’re sincere and genuine. And nothing can beat that.”

by Chris Berens

When I was a boy, my father brought me to many exhibitions of the Dutch Golden Age painters, including Frans Hals, Rembrandt and Vermeer, and those images became infused into the internal world he began imagining as a child. He studied illustration at the Academy of Art and Design in Den Bosch, graduating in 1999.

While working as a freelance illustrator, I began to teach myself to paint in several dilapidated buildings in the rural area near my childhood home. Attempting to emulate the painting methods of the Old Masters and 19th-century academic artists like Ingres and Bouguereau, I learned by copying their work, and eventually came upon a technique which allowed me to achieve an otherwordly dreamlike impression of the qualities I admired in my predecessors. 

My technique is not one I at one time ‘made up’. I tried thousands of things and combine the ones that work for me. It is not an isolated technique. It took me 8 years to get to the tecnical point where I am now and it is still very much evolving and will probably be completely different again in a couple of years. The particular ink, paper, brushes, water, varnish, laquers, glue and panels I use happen to work for me for now. And I like to keep that particular information to myself as it is useful only to me.
So don’t get hung up on the technique too much. It’s just ink and paper. It’s no magic ink. Or magic paper. I try and find my own language in imagery, as in my opinon it all comes from gesture -being the aesthetic of the brushstrokes and their emotional impact- your imagination and trying to stay true to yourself. When images come from deep within, they’re sincere and genuine. And nothing can beat that.”

by Nicolás Santiago Romero Escalada I was born, they fed me, educated me, instructed me, and shaped me, but no one ever made me “discover” graffiti. We came together by chance upon seeing and analyzing one another (with the street in the middle) and we taught one another, getting to know each other in the moment just before my pre-teen period (it was either masturbate or paint something). First I thought that it could be a passtime, and then I realized that I had quit cigarettes but not graffiti. On the contrary, I felt that it was growing more each day…there is no day when I don’t think about: what to paint, where to paint, how to paint, what day, what hour, basically organizing my life around it. At the end of this new decade I realized the value of the message left behind within 48 hours of the exercise (painting). Thinking that revolutions are told on the walls says a lot about that, let’s say, as a sort of direct protest of society for society. I think that graffiti is a point of connection for people, at least that’s what I like to explore with this beautiful activity. I discovered my style by accident, when love (maybe the culprit of the greatest idiocies of mankind) brought me to creating the face of an ex girlfriend and I saw that it came relatively easily…maybe I made her a little fat and her nose a bit crooked, but from a distance it looked just like her. The thing is that I had always been fascinated by the human body, the meat that hides the bones, what we hold inside, and more than that of just its function, no? So, to combine a small obsession for the body with a love of experimentation with people, the only way is with the idealization of something with a religious slant. Religion has put symbols in our heads that come out even today in our ways of representing the body. Each person sanctifies when they ignore. This is the result of my work, to give importance to the inconsequential, to “deify” an unremarkable person.

by Nicolás Santiago Romero Escalada

I was born, they fed me, educated me, instructed me, and shaped me, but no one ever made me “discover” graffiti. We came together by chance upon seeing and analyzing one another (with the street in the middle) and we taught one another, getting to know each other in the moment just before my pre-teen period (it was either masturbate or paint something).

First I thought that it could be a passtime, and then I realized that I had quit cigarettes but not graffiti. On the contrary, I felt that it was growing more each day…there is no day when I don’t think about: what to paint, where to paint, how to paint, what day, what hour, basically organizing my life around it.

At the end of this new decade I realized the value of the message left behind within 48 hours of the exercise (painting). Thinking that revolutions are told on the walls says a lot about that, let’s say, as a sort of direct protest of society for society. I think that graffiti is a point of connection for people, at least that’s what I like to explore with this beautiful activity.

I discovered my style by accident, when love (maybe the culprit of the greatest idiocies of mankind) brought me to creating the face of an ex girlfriend and I saw that it came relatively easily…maybe I made her a little fat and her nose a bit crooked, but from a distance it looked just like her. The thing is that I had always been fascinated by the human body, the meat that hides the bones, what we hold inside, and more than that of just its function, no?

So, to combine a small obsession for the body with a love of experimentation with people, the only way is with the idealization of something with a religious slant. Religion has put symbols in our heads that come out even today in our ways of representing the body. Each person sanctifies when they ignore.

This is the result of my work, to give importance to the inconsequential, to “deify” an unremarkable person.

50 Watts

a blog by Will Schofield

Quite possibly the richest source of book-related design and illustration in the universe. Will displays the fervor of the most dedicated historian whilst time and again proving he has an eye for exceptional images.” —David Pearson

From August 2007 to February 2011 I went by the cryptic, impossible-to-remember pseudonym “A Journey Round My Skull” (not quite JAMS, not quite ARMS). I’m gradually importing all 700+ posts from “Journey” into my new home 50 Watts.


In January 2010 I was invited by the two guys of But Does it Float to begin posting there. BDiF runs onCargo, which I quickly fell in love with. 50 Watts uses Cargo’s ‘biblio’ layout.


The new name has something to do with Charlie Watts, Beckett’s Watt, Charles Wright & the Watts 103rd Street Rhythm Band, dim light bulbs, riots, cheap amps, chaos theory, and the friend who threatened violence if I didn’t drop my old moniker. [April update: Let’s not forget Naomi Watts inMulholland Drive.]


A Journey Round My Skull remains a great name for a book about undergoing brain surgery in 1936.


—Will Schofield (March 2011)


by Tara Dougans I am a 25 year old Canadian-born, London-based art director and illustrator. My work is heavily influenced by the virtue of ‘taking one’s time’ and focuses specifically on handcraftsmanship, the value of process and detail oriented design. Following my Grandmother’s expression “You reap what you sow”, I am interested in exploring the fundamental role that time plays in the development of an object or idea. Accordingly, my work is constructed with love by hand.

by Tara Dougans

I am a 25 year old Canadian-born, London-based art director and illustrator. My work is heavily influenced by the virtue of ‘taking one’s time’ and focuses specifically on handcraftsmanship, the value of process and detail oriented design. Following my Grandmother’s expression “You reap what you sow”, I am interested in exploring the fundamental role that time plays in the development of an object or idea. Accordingly, my work is constructed with love by hand.

by Iain Macarthur My work can be described as surreal and unique in its own way. Using mostly pencil, watercolours and pigment pens, I create portraits of ordinary people but create them in a unusual way by, embellishing patterns and watercolour effects into the portrait to give a vivid explosion effect—transforming their faces from something plain to something entirely bizarre and wonderful at the same time.

by Iain Macarthur

My work can be described as surreal and unique in its own way. Using mostly pencil, watercolours and pigment pens, I create portraits of ordinary people but create them in a unusual way by, embellishing patterns and watercolour effects into the portrait to give a vivid explosion effect—transforming their faces from something plain to something entirely bizarre and wonderful at the same time.

by Nikki Rosato Our physical bodies are beautiful structures full of detail, and they hold the stories that haunt and mold our lives. The lines on a road map are beautifully similar to the lines that cover the surface of the human body. In my most recent work involving maps, as I remove the landmasses from the silhouetted individuals I am further removing the figure’s identity, and what remains is a delicate skin-like structure. Through this process, specific individuals become ambiguous and hauntingly ghost-like, similar to the memories they represent.

by Nikki Rosato

Our physical bodies are beautiful structures full of detail, and they hold the stories that haunt and mold our lives. The lines on a road map are beautifully similar to the lines that cover the surface of the human body.

In my most recent work involving maps, as I remove the landmasses from the silhouetted individuals I am further removing the figure’s identity, and what remains is a delicate skin-like structure. Through this process, specific individuals become ambiguous and hauntingly ghost-like, similar to the memories they represent.

by Jules Buck Jones My work deals with animals. The depiction of animals through drawing and lore is as ancient as the imagination. The impressions and ideas they provoke range from symbolism to science. I make large scale, 2-dimensioal drawings, sometimes bizarre and fantastic, other times simple and subtle. All of this stems from a long interest in the natural sciences. The work grows from thoughts and research on biological and ecological concerns as well as along narrative and mythical dimensions.I depict my animals in various ways. I use techniques inspired by the clear careful illustrations of field guides, through a range of expressive and abstract artists. A lot of my work bumps representation up against its limits. Abstraction comes into play in many ways. At times an animal, drawn in larger than life scale will melt away into aggressive strokes of color and marks, robbing the animal of its form. Other times I assemble animals into geometric formations, or I’ll attempt to merge scientific diagrams with the myths that precede them.My work is very much about drawing itself. The line plays a crucial role in the development of my subject matter. I draw with a quick, gestural, playful delivery, which I believe gives the subject a liveliness that often eludes a slower, more meticulous, depiction. I use a variety of media from all sorts of drawing tools, such as graphite, charcoal, and wax, to different water-based pigments as inks, acrylic, watercolor, and gouache. I team lines with washes to build or negate my subjects. I strictly work on paper, preferably larger than a person. To me, drawing has more of a romantic relationship to paper than to other surfaces, like wood or canvas. The paper allows my pencils to glide when they move and embraces my washes in some symbiotic manner. The grand scale creates a 1 to 1 ratio between work and viewer. Conceptually I think this is interesting and intrinsic to the dialogue between man and nature. The scale is also conducive to the loose descriptions and allows a greater arena to suggest the infinite details nature provides.I revel in the idea of continuing the long inscription of drawing, painting, sculpting and believing in animals. I draw inspiration from prehistoric cave paintings, totemic symbols, the great artist/naturalists like Seba, Haeckel, Audobon, and a contemporary art world increasingly more aware and intrigued with issues of the natural world. Fact and fiction, past, present and the future, all play a role in my work. I aim to express and conjure the flesh and magic of evolution, classification, environment, bio-diversity, mutation, and extinction.

by Jules Buck Jones

My work deals with animals. The depiction of animals through drawing and lore is as ancient as the imagination. The impressions and ideas they provoke range from symbolism to science. I make large scale, 2-dimensioal drawings, sometimes bizarre and fantastic, other times simple and subtle. All of this stems from a long interest in the natural sciences. The work grows from thoughts and research on biological and ecological concerns as well as along narrative and mythical dimensions.

I depict my animals in various ways. I use techniques inspired by the clear careful illustrations of field guides, through a range of expressive and abstract artists. A lot of my work bumps representation up against its limits. Abstraction comes into play in many ways. At times an animal, drawn in larger than life scale will melt away into aggressive strokes of color and marks, robbing the animal of its form. Other times I assemble animals into geometric formations, or I’ll attempt to merge scientific diagrams with the myths that precede them.

My work is very much about drawing itself. The line plays a crucial role in the development of my subject matter. I draw with a quick, gestural, playful delivery, which I believe gives the subject a liveliness that often eludes a slower, more meticulous, depiction. I use a variety of media from all sorts of drawing tools, such as graphite, charcoal, and wax, to different water-based pigments as inks, acrylic, watercolor, and gouache. I team lines with washes to build or negate my subjects. I strictly work on paper, preferably larger than a person. To me, drawing has more of a romantic relationship to paper than to other surfaces, like wood or canvas. The paper allows my pencils to glide when they move and embraces my washes in some symbiotic manner. The grand scale creates a 1 to 1 ratio between work and viewer. Conceptually I think this is interesting and intrinsic to the dialogue between man and nature. The scale is also conducive to the loose descriptions and allows a greater arena to suggest the infinite details nature provides.

I revel in the idea of continuing the long inscription of drawing, painting, sculpting and believing in animals. I draw inspiration from prehistoric cave paintings, totemic symbols, the great artist/naturalists like Seba, Haeckel, Audobon, and a contemporary art world increasingly more aware and intrigued with issues of the natural world. Fact and fiction, past, present and the future, all play a role in my work. I aim to express and conjure the flesh and magic of evolution, classification, environment, bio-diversity, mutation, and extinction.

by Raphael Vicenzi A self-taught artist whose illustration and watercolour techniques are influenced by fashion, street art and graffiti. Mixing digital media, painting and sketches and drawing on watercolours, splotches and textures, he creates immensely detailed images that are both meticulous and ethereal.  Really beautiful  illustrations that are a wonder to look at in detail. His work led me to the agency that represents him, Colagene. Plenty of other great illustrators …

by Raphael Vicenzi

A self-taught artist whose illustration and watercolour techniques are influenced by fashion, street art and graffiti. Mixing digital media, painting and sketches and drawing on watercolours, splotches and textures, he creates immensely detailed images that are both meticulous and ethereal.

 Really beautiful  illustrations that are a wonder to look at in detail.

His work led me to the agency that represents him, Colagene. Plenty of other great illustrators …

by Winnie Truong These drawings feature heads floating in the disconcerting blankness of white space; carefully rendered hair playing a variety of aggressive yet seductive roles, encasing the faces of her figures as a soft, personal armor or twining around their throats with foreboding. The impressive work is created with pastels and colored pencils on paper, a mastery of optical mixing and a build up of cross hatching to reveal the intriguing forms.  (by JL Schnabel)

by Winnie Truong

These drawings feature heads floating in the disconcerting blankness of white space; carefully rendered hair playing a variety of aggressive yet seductive roles, encasing the faces of her figures as a soft, personal armor or twining around their throats with foreboding. The impressive work is created with pastels and colored pencils on paper, a mastery of optical mixing and a build up of cross hatching to reveal the intriguing forms.  (by JL Schnabel)