Paris based artist/sketcher Matthieu Barrère has been creating a slew of these well thought out and quickly drawn illustrations for a while now. His sense of humor is sometimes cheesy and sometimes even a bit dark, but always sure to make you smile. He looks at life from a skewed angle, often taking everyday cliches and giving them a new twist which brings them to life again.
Singapore based artist and graphic designer Budi Satria Kwan makes heavy use of negative space in his very catchy works. His designs are colorful, pop with enthusiasm and though they lean toward aesthetic minimalism, they create quite an impact with their carefully chosen details.
When you see Tatiana Plakhava’s designs, they seem to capture the energy of tiny particles colliding in the Large Hadron Collider, revealing an explosive and colorful beauty. Her highly complex designs combine science, illustration, photography, and music, which makes her one well rounded individual.
Illustrator Dain Fagerholm, of Seattle, USA, has developed a portfolio comprised of hand drawn three dimensional GIFs to which he has given the name ‘stereographic drawings’. Stereographic images have existed for hundreds of years as a 3D illustrative technique. In this method, one tricks the eye with two parallel images captured with a minor difference in perspective to be shown at a close range in order to simulate a tactile quality. Fagerholm’s approach is quite similar to this antiquated approach, but, in place of hyper-realistic drawings or photos of landscapes or people, the artist instead creates an illusion of depth for his hand drawn mystical creatures to appear lively. In order to create stereographic sketches, fagerholm first sketches the monster figures, gems and surreal landscape with colorful markers or pens. The artist then converts his illustrations into stereographic GIFs, enabling his two dimensional drawings to become three dimensional,
moving images.
Austria-based artist Anatol Knotek is a visual poetry specialist. His expert talents in the arts transcend your average painting or illustration. Knotek incorporates the art of the written word into his creations. In fact, his text portraits are an amalgamation of scribbles and handwritten text.
Often working with a permanent marker on canvas, the poetry artist utilizes the boldness of the writing tool against the blank, matte white of his subjects’ faces. Knotek uses words that hold some modicum of value to each figure’s visage, whether they are well-known figures in life or simply a woman drawn in blue. When looked upon with a fine magnifying glass, one can see Bob Dylan’s own lyrics “We live in a political world” scrawled out into the background of his portrait amongst a sea of words.
