Camille is a Los Angeles based low brow artist whose art mainly focuses of portraying females in surreal and unnerving environments. Her style is individualistic and engaging and also something that is wonderfully unique to her and that is something I aim for personally as an artist.
Her use of colours is particularly interesting to me as she uses a wide range of bright colours but somehow they manage not to clash and come together really nicely. There is so much to look at in each painting and the amount of detail included is really intricate.
I think my favourite aspect of her work is how she has designed the birds and crocodiles t she includes in some of her pictures. They look creepy but oddly charming?
Her style is similar to my own in that she designs her characters with big eyes and full lashes with small mouths and noses but they all seem to have the same melancholy expression too which is something I often find myself doing when drawing my characters.
She has recently illustrated her own version of Cinderella and I think this is a fantastic way of introducing and opening children's minds to other art forms than just generic pretty princesses.
Her quirky artwork is something that I take a lot of inspiration from and I decided to create my own character to see to what extent our our styles were similar.
Graciela Goncalves De Silva (Animalitoland)
Graciela is another artist that I got to hear speak at Pictoplasma. Her presentation was perhaps the most engaging and interesting of all in the conference due to her sheer passion for creating characters and how open she was about her vivid imagination. What I loved about her was how she placed herself in the mind of the character and based them off her own desires. I had the pleasure of talking to her myself a few days after the presentation where she was taking some pictures of her newest mural and she was so personable and encouraging. I wanted to know how she actually went about painting a large scale mural and she informed me that she sketches it out over a picture she has taken of the blank space and uses a grinding technique to map everything correctly. She encouraged me to start spray painting myself and that is something I would love to get into! Her artwork is diverse in terms of her character designs and the way she paints portrays a whimsical and magical environment in her artwork. She is certainly an artist to keep an eye on and a lovely, kind person at that!
Hikari Shimoda
An amazingly talented Japanese artist that I had the pleasure of hearing speak at Pictoplasma 2015 in Berlin. Her artwork mostly features images of children with hollow, sad expressions which contrasts with the vibrant colours she uses in her paintings. In her talk she explained how these children are the survivors of the Hiroshima atomic bomb tragedy. Some of the children have a scar across their throat and she explained this was due to the throat cancer that people suffered from as a result of the bomb. I love her work because of the amount of detail that is included in each image, especially the hair and skin. Her artwork is mostly traditional oil paint on canvas and she occasionally incorporates collage work into the portraits using stickers.
She explained her influences are also the likes of Japanese "kawaii" culture, meaning cute. This is no surprise as it is a massive aspect of young people's lives in Japan as are anime and manga and the typical "magical girl" stereotype stemming from the likes of Sailor Moon.
What draws me to her art is the contrast in how pretty her paintings are and the dark concepts behind them.
Loish
Loish is one of my favourite artists that I have ever known. Her digital painting style is something that I aim to simulate in my own work and adapt it to my style. Sometimes I look at her work and feel rather down because of how amazing it is, I think to myself that I should be at her level of ability. But then I realise she is 9 years older than me and so she has had nearly a decade longer than me to master her craft. This gives me hope that I can be as incredible as her one day!
Her pictures normally feature images of females with large eyes and flowing hair (much like my own) her painting style is soft in texture yet vibrant in colour but retains a look of traditional artwork due to the types of brushes she uses.
I think my favourite aspect of her art is her use of colour to shade and highlight and how she has a perfect grasp on how light and shadow affect an object and person.
Sakimichan
Sakimi-chan is without question the queen digital painting and has completely mastered painting portraits of various popular characters. She has a very large number of fans on social media and deviantART and she also has many pledges from fans who wish to learn from her on Patreon. What I love about her artwork is how flawless and vibrant her painting style looks. It baffles me how she works despite watching numerous tutorials and examining the different layers that make up a picture (one of the rewards as a subscriber to her Patreon)
In truth I think her style is perfect but I would like to see more diversity in her characters faces as most of the females look very similar, as do the males. Despite this, I commend her for her amazing amount of talent and I hope I can one day reach her level of expertise.
Boxingsocks
Most of their work is created traditionally through the use of pencils, fine liners and brush pens but occasionally they work digitally too. What I love about their style is how freely they draw but their drawing always seems to come together and look amazing. A page from their sketchbook may look crowded and rather scribble but the anatomy is all correct albeit stylised and I am a massive fan of this approach. What I have learned from them is how to look at my sketchbook and come up with poses that will fit into the gaps on an already occupied page so that the sketchbook fills up instead of having just one picture per page. I have also become a lot more experimental in terms of testing out expressions and poses. Their are one of my favourite artists.
Nothinginmymadness
I think perhaps my favourite artist on this list is this one. I absolutely adore everything about their style from their use of colour to their flowing and individualistic way of drawing the body and making each character they draw have their own set of unique features. Since becoming aware of this artist I have notices a change in my own artwork. My lines are much more freely drawn and I an concentrating more of defining individualistic body types and expressions for characters that I draw. The way they paint digitally is what I love most about their art as it comes across as looking traditional. As a result of this I intend to experiment more with various brushes in Photoshop to see if I can achieve a similar effect.
Takao Yamamoto
A Japanese artist who paints very intricate images mostly depicting women and body horror.
I have a keen interest in anatomy and so it is interesting to find an artist who has their own style of showing anatomy. His style includes a lot of wave like curves and detail, similar to my own and his approach is neat and crisp. I am not a fan of all of his work though as some of his paintings verge on eroticism but regardless his artistic ability is very commendable. I am thinking of doing a large picture of my own influenced by his style.
