ILLUSTRATORS
EYEWEAR
The Prada Woman Spring/Summer 2015 show witnessed the debut of new materials that area symbol of skillful craftsmanship and a return to nature.
Drawing inspiration from this idea, the Prada Raw Eyewear collection is the result of an unprecedented combination of a contemporary design and a brand new material, wood.
The choice of black walnut and “Malabar” ebony – two precious types of wood characterized by strength, alluring nuances and marked natural veining – reflects the brand’s great attention to the quality of materials used. Thanks to a special “layered” manufacturing technique, which makes the wood surprisingly malleable, the new models ensure a lightweight feel, comfort and a perfect, snug fit.
The natural irregularity of the wood’s veining turns each pair of glasses into a unique creation, the utmost expression of masterly craftsmanship.
Primarily influenced by high fashion photography, Blair Breitenstein’s illustration practice trades in watercolors and what she calls “messy smudged lines.”
Breitenstein was more or less discovered on Instagram.
The abstract “Expressionist” fashion musings of this Seattle artist are like a good song—intoxicating and almost otherworldly; they’re exaggerated perceptions of people and things, yet they come to life on the page stylistically like high fashion’s response, more than 100 years later, to Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s Berlin street scenes.
Breitenstein has been drawing and painting since she was a little girl; in fact, her grandfather was an artist, and inspired her initially.
She recently moved to New York City, and it is unclear how this change of scenery will affect her work. But she’s happy to be living and working in the Big Apple.
Every morning, when Breitenstein wakes up, she turns to an image library she keeps to inspire her to paint and draw each day. This image collecting works as a jumping-off point for her creative process.
“I love to mix water color with pastel and acrylic paint,” she says, “It creates great texture.” She is also a master of text lettering.
You can see her work on Instagram @blairz or visit her “My Daily Drawings” blog, Blonde Lasagna.
Born and raised in New York City, Carly Kuhn currently resides in Los Angeles. Yet her style is reminiscent of Big Apple luminaries before her—Al Hirschfield and Maira Kalman come to mind—yet she possesses a distinctly personal touch, one perfectly suited for the medium of magazines.
As of earlier this year, she became the CEO of The Cartorialist, her own art studio, which you can check out on Instagram @thecartorialist
“The inspiration/motivation to get working,” she says, “is my remembering that this is not just a hobby anymore, but a job—which is both exciting and scary. Fear and excitement are good motivators. I feel like I’m still figuring out who I am as an artist.”
She works almost exclusively with black ink pen and brush pen markers.
Kuhn’s New York roots, she says, will always have an effect on her work. But after college, she moved to Los Angeles, and worked in comedy television for six years. This led her to explore producing art full time, earlier this year.
“Los Angeles is a very nurturing city for self-employed creative types, more so than NYC,” she says. “I don’t think if I were living in NYC I would have taken the leap to leave my traditional job and become self-employed.”
Kuhn’s style is unabashedly fashion forward, and her pen and ink creations respond to the news and images of the day. Like a breaking news cycle, she posts her work-in-progress to the Internet for the world to see.
Minimalist Dutch artist Judith Van Den Hoek admittedly likes to work in black and white, sketching her way through preliminary ideas. Fashion blogs, print magazines and books inspire her day to day, but it was the creative outpouring of René Gruau that first inspired her to start drawing; she continues to channel his whimsical simplicity into her work. A simple smudge came come to life in a few black and white brush strokes.
“[One day] I was reading ELLE Girl and I spotted a gorgeous fashion illustration,” she says. “That was the time I decided that I wanted to make fashion illustrations.” Yet she say she had always drawn as a child. This just re-focused her sketchbooks.
She credits spotting good street fashion and her daily Internet tendency as her major motivator to work. “I love browsing through Tumblr and Pinterest,” she says. “I can get lost for hours.”
Van Den Hoek resides in the smaller city of Gouda in Holland, which grounds her. “[A lot of people] ask me: Aren’t you supposed to live in Amsterdam or New York or Paris, the city of fashion?” she says. “But Gouda is the place I love to come home to when I travel for work. Here I can find peace and quiet and I guess that’s what I need working in this hectic industry.”
“A few years ago I used to draw everything by hand,” she says of her working style and medium of choice. “I also didn’t know any better. Nowadays, I’m still drawing by hand but not that often anymore. I like to draw in Photoshop.”
You can see her work at: http://judithvandenhoek.tumblr.com/
Megan Hess was “born to draw.” An early flirtation with a career in graphic design allowed her to rise through the ranks, as she explored what became her glamorous “signature style:” lusciously drawn black and white portraiture; sometimes with just the right hint of color.
Her style developed over time, reaching a pop-culture nexus with Sex and the City when she illustrated the cover for the now-famous Candice Bushnell book.
Hess’s obsession with drawing began when she was a little girl. “I have vivid memories of being in primary school,” she says. “I would sketch little caricatures of my class mates. The drawings were pretty terrible, but they did somehow look like the person. I remember feeling like I’d found a little bit of magic.” It grew from there.
Her biggest inspiration is working on a new brief. “I really try to give a good amount of time to the concept’s beginning stages,” she says. “Once I have a really clear and inspiring idea in my head, I’m then like a runaway train—sketching as fast as my hand can go. It’s also the actual process of turning a blank white page into something with feeling.”
Hess is fortunate enough to work in many different cities and countries around the world. “When I’m in New York, I’m working at a faster pace, and the style of my illustrations are much more urban and sketchy,” she says. “Then when I’m working in Paris or Milan I feel my style is more whimsical and passionate. And lest I forget Australia—where I have my main studio—there’s always a sense of excitement that comes through my work in that environment.”
More recently, Hess released her first written and illustrated book, Fashion House, which is comprised of illustrated interiors from the icons of style.
No matter where she’s working, she executes almost all her work with a bespoke Montblanc ink pen she affectionately calls “Monty.” It was custom-made to fit her hand and drawing style, and feels weightless when she draws. “As long as I have Monty and my sketch books,” she says, “I’m good to go.”
You can find out more about Miss Hess’s work at: http://meganhess.com/
Vida Vega is, first and foremost, an animator. As a student in London, she made award-winning films. Vega also makes inkblots and fashion illustration come alive; she literally re-imagines what is possible with a cocktail napkin illustration.
Vega’s artist abilities transcend every medium she flirts with. She is a wunderkind by all stretch of imagination.
When she was a child, her father taped obscure experimental animations for her from late night BBC and Channel 4. Some of her favorite films were Yellow Submarine (she used to day dream of being in that sparkly Lucy In the Sky with Diamonds painterly sequence with the horse) as well as Disney classics like Fantasia and the Little Mermaid. “Anything animated,” she says.
Her Italian grandfather, meanwhile, stockpiled Topolino Fumetti comic books for her to read when she was visiting Italy, he parents homeland. (She grew up in England.) Giorgio Cavazzano was her favorite: “The cleanness of his line and the life in his expression are brilliant,” she says.
Later, Vega was a teenager she went through a few years of writing and not drawing at all. “I was really frustrated and blocked with this feeling that I didn’t have a ‘style’ of my own,” she says. “Then whilst sitting in the cinema listening to ‘Beyond the Sea’ by Bobby Darin, and watching the end credits of Finding Nemo (of all things) roll past, I had this realization that I would be so happy to be a name amongst those names on the credit roll.”
She likes to animate by hand digitally as “it’s so responsive and you can get instant feedback on movement.”
“With ink I love the finality of the mark,” she says. “You can’t undo, you have to go with the drawing or start over. You can push things around on the page but only while they stay wet. It’s nice to have these limitations to work with, it forces you to think on your feet and loosen up. I think you can feel that energy in a drawing.”
You can see Vega’s work at: http://vidavega.com/
Hong Kong-based artist, animator and director Wong Ping thinks like a scientist. According to him, one day he “found out that we know all the answers are wrong; and coincidence makes us feel good about everything.” His work is a response to that brave new world; you can see his scientific mind at work through his neo-sexual, surrealistic studies.
Until a few years ago, he says, he didn’t know anything about art. “I started drawing, creating and animating about five years ago. It just came out—all of a sudden, one day,” he says. His kaleidoscopic imagery—brimming with vibrant color—tackles nearly taboo subjects in main land China: teenage lust, shame and sexual repression.
Ping’s biggest inspirations, he says, are hiking, anger and boredom, and not necessarily in that order.
“Hong Kong is a stressful place,” he says matter-of-factly. “It keeps me working 16 hours a day. But it is a suppressed place.
“I only dare to speak out through my works—the feelings of anger and boredom toward the place or even the world maybe—is one reason why my works are related to sexual and colorful images.”
He loves working on a computer to create his work because, he says, “there’s an undo button.”
This fall, Wong will open his first solo show in Hong Kong. You can check out his work at: http://nowhynowhy.com/ or on Instagram @nowhynowhy
