After much consideration, I have decided that Illustration is the discipline that I want to pursue.
I get the most enjoyment out of designing characters, focusing on small details and experimenting with colour. I want to continue to dedicate myself to enhancing my skills and making my art more whole.
Concept Artist was the other main discipline I was considering. Ultimately, I decided that being an illustrator might suit my work habits better. A concept artist is often required to produce several variations of sketches, illustrations or designs within a short timeframe. Depending on the project, there could be up to 200 images created across development. Although trial and error is easily a part of illustrative and design processes, the high volume of outcomes is not standard for illustration and typically involves a handful of finalised drawings. Personally, I would prefer to work on a select number of visuals and render them until completion.
Following my conclusion, I have stumbled across a project that includes media that makes me long to push my capabilities and see what I can achieve with my art. These include covers and panels from a comic book series based on the video game franchise “Sonic the Hedgehog”, published by IDW Publishing. These issues are worked on by a single artist or a collaboration of artists, with the art style changing from issue to issue and across the series. However, I have found that some of my favourite pieces are from the same few artists.
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Nathalie Fourdraine has often been the artist who creates the RI (Retail Incentive) covers for the series. These are variant covers acquired when a retailer purchases a certain number of copies. Her art within these covers is lineless, with an array of lively and playful colours tied together with an overtone of blue, green or red depending on the context of the illustration. The scenes always highlight the characters in a dynamic view, whether they are “caught” in the middle of action or the scene itself uses compositional techniques — like the Golden Ratio.
What adds to this is Fourdraine’s use of geometric shapes and understanding of 3D forms. The seamlessly sharp edges of each shape make it easy to differentiate between each focal point, supporting the definite structure of her illustrations. Lastly, the use of the textured brush pen creates an element of softness.
Another art style I am quite fond of is the work of Evan Stanley, the lead writer and artist of the comic series. She uses a textured brush pen with a line weight that varies slightly throughout her illustrations, making everything almost seem flat. However, she pairs this with shading techniques such as black cel shading, hatching, and textured blotting to bring dimension back outside the colours. On top of this, there is a level of immersion that Stanley’s art brings from the composition of the panels themselves.
They lay over one another, with characters arranged over panels and the occasional triangular frame, demonstrating how much occurs in these scenes. In combination with the characters’ expressiveness, each page becomes dynamic and lively.
Through becoming absorbed in the storytelling, I’ve learnt what personally retains my interest and makes me eager to learn what comes next. I think this should be what drives me to create my own illustrations — to create visuals so captivating that the viewer/ reader temporarily gets lost within their narrative.
