Category Archives: Illustration

Illustrating With Words: Luke Lucas’ Typography

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You may have already seen Luke Lucas’ typography work, but weren’t aware of it; he’s created designs for companies like Target, Nestlé, The New York Times, and Barnes & Noble. He’s also done work for exhibitions and creates his own fonts. Some of the more humorous and elaborate text designs are reminiscent of Wayne White’s word paintings. Of his work, Lucas writes, “I love that the same word, passage or even letter can be treated in bunch of different ways and embody entirely different meanings… That and through subtleties like a slight shift in line weight, the elongation of a tail or the arc you use, a letter can go from contemporary to traditional or happy to sad in a single stroke…”

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Amber Fawn Keig Draws From Real Life

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Bay Area-based printmaker Amber Fawn Keig‘s works on paper are a collection of colored pencil, gouache and lithographic prints—pulled together under the cohesive investigation of memory. The likenesses scratched out in her careful, stylistic black-and-white prints have the visually-loaded tinge of early 1990′s Americana. Keig usually works with imagery of her friends and family to create these works, although the narratives expressed are somewhat vague and seemingly fictional.

If anything, the litho prints pull the viewer in for a moment of intense technical examination, to look closely at Keig’s tiny, expert strokes, and to take in her careful thematic twists and turns, often embedded in the layered images she pulls together. While the black-and-white works stand well on their own, they’re complimented perfectly by the fluid, intuitive colorwork of her painted and pencil-drawn works. THe moments where the two mediums intersect are the most interesting, but each part of Keig’s current series seems to feed well into the same conceptual vein. While the scale is small, the subject matter is quite curious, and these works carry a kind of welcome, yet weary hominess in their portrayal of contemporary American experience.

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Watercolor Paintings of Imagined Epic Proportions

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Rob Sato - Watercolors Rob Sato - WatercolorsRob Sato - WatercolorsRob Sato’s watercolor paintings are whimsical clashes of documented history and personal dreaming: a magpie pictorial narrative of his own internal processing system or as he says, an “extension of writing” and “sifting through garbage. Getting a lot of trash out of my head.” His ability to condense worlds, communities, and landscapes into one surreal solid depiction, interestingly enough, conceptually harkens back to Vincent VanGogh’s statement on the watercolor medium itself as “a splendid thing” to “express atmosphere and distance, so that the figure is surrounded by air and can breathe in it.”

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Made With Color Presents: Benjamin Grossblat’s Twisted Celebrity Illustrations

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We’re keeping the steady stream of amazing artwork coming as a part of our partnership with premiere website building platform Made With Color. Each week we bring you some of the most exciting artists and designers working today who are using Made With Color to create clean and sleek websites. Made With Color sites aren’t just good looking, they are extremely easy to set up with no coding involved and an intuitive user interface that makes building a site a breeze. This week we are delighted to bring you the kooky and humorous  celebrity illustrations of Benjamin Grossblat!

Benjamin Grossblat’s illustrations are fanciful, innocent and twisted at the same time. And no more is this evident than in his celebrity portraits. In his portraits Morgan Freeman is almost boyish with his curly lashes, freckles and sparkly eyes while Kim Jong Il is an endlessly wrinkly amorphous blob with mustard yellow teeth.  The faces of these famous figures are instantly recognizable, by distorting them, Benjamin manages to capture their essence; the portraits have a certain vulnerability and humor that makes even the scowling Trump more likeable.

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Dad’s Illustrates With Each Day’s Lunch for Five Years

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It’s difficult to not get nostalgic seeing these little lunches.  Graphic designer David Laferriere had already been making lunch for his children.  One morning he found a permanent marker near the sandwiches.  Five years later, Laferriere has drawn illustrations on nearly 1,100 of his children’s lunch bags.  Depending on his morning inspiration, Laferriere will draw a different image each morning – animals, robots, monsters, even images that play with the shape of the sandwich.  [via]

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The Calm But Powerful Swimming Pool Works Of Kristen Martincic

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Kristen Martincic‘s swimming pool works on paper are enchanting as they are crisp, clean, and inspiring.  She encompasses the feeling of calmness associated with empty swimming pools but adds character and surreal beauty by making them appear to be almost prizes to be won that you want to pick up and haul home.  These pieces are “a hybrid of print, drawing, and painting on panel,” as stated by Kristen.  Monotype, acrylic, and matsuo kozo paper are used.  Their simplicity allows the viewer to realize the provocative nature of each pool’s space and surfaces.  The layered effects she creates with her media builds added textured qualities raising the feelings of mystery, tension, and intimacy.

Her swimming pool works on paper SURFACE TENSION, will be on display at Wonder Fair Gallery starting April 26 and will remain on view through May 26th.

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The Smooth And Surreal Illustrations of Ville Savimaa

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The illustrations of Ville Savimaa are smooth.  The soft curves and soft colors combine to   produce dreamy scenes.  He fuses elements of nature, animals, people, and fashion, to complete very complex compositions that are not overly busy.  Savimaa begins his pieces in pencil and completes them digitally.  His clean and fluid style as an illustrator has won him several high profile clients including Adidas, Disney, Nokia, and Sony.

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Matt Leines’ Hyperbolic At Beginnings NYC

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Matt Leines currently lives and works in Brooklyn. He recently opened a solo exhibition entitled Hyperbolic at Beginnings NYC. From the quirky press release: “First there was Da Vinci, then Picasso and now there is Matt Leines and this show is called Hyperbolic. Ever the patient and earnest image-maker, surrealist sign-painter and erstwhile myth-shaper, Leines relocated to New York after a spell in Philadelphia during the year in which the world was scheduled to end. Settling into a fresh rhythm, he began a series of paintings that drew on those familiar rituals, traced the good ol’ sigils, but manipulated colors and shapes from the present with an attitude more formal, bright and tight. The young man in the studio considering a renaissance–small “r”. Real, live inscrutable people and chattering patterns. A happy creature drifting through the kitchen cosmos. Native American name-givers and the zig-zag of eternity. Leines’ recent output is a reminder that creative, figurative work has always been foundational to modern art.” The show is on view through May 5th 2013.

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