New York-based artist Yohei Horishita creates digital illustrations with a textured effect that evokes traditional painting. His work is ornate and figurative, juxtaposing human characters with imaginary settings that seem to belong to no particular time or place. Flowers and feathers consume his backgrounds, cultivating a fantasy space removed from our contemporary reality. While Horishita does extensive client work, his pieces have a distinct style that allows them to stand alone.
New York-based artist Yohei Horishita creates digital illustrations with a textured effect that evokes traditional painting. His work is ornate and figurative, juxtaposing human characters with imaginary settings that seem to belong to no particular time or place. Flowers and feathers consume his backgrounds, cultivating a fantasy space removed from our contemporary reality. While Horishita does extensive client work, his pieces have a distinct style that allows them to stand alone.
Illustrator Selin Çınar crafts unexpected elements tucked inside familiar forms. Creating work under the moniker “Axstone,” the artist is able to move between the worlds of exhibiting and character design. She also implements varying techniques in the pieces, with elements of pointillism, clean linework, and a less controlled approach sometimes appearing in the same piece. Çınar is a member of the illustrator collective Krüw.
Yuko Shimizu’s illustrations continue to captivate, whether they adorn books, magazine stories, comic book coveries, or gallery walls. The New York City-based, Japan-born artist is known for a diverse client list, from NIKE and The New York Times to Library of Congress. As usual, Shimizu shares thorough process documentation online, showing how she crafts her professional and personal work on a granular level.
Chinese artist Zhou Fan creates whimsical depictions of natural growths gone amuck: fungi, weeds and fluorescent drippings of alien goo stack upon characters' heads and faces like strange, invasive species. Fan says that the inspiration for these colorful paintings came from a dream he had in which jellyfish fell from the sky and became mushrooms. The human characters appear to be overtaken by these extraterrestrial entities as they lodge themselves onto their faces and limbs. Fan's paintings have a flat, illustrative quality that evokes Japanese Pop Art and animation (Miyazaki and Murakami come to mind when viewing his imaginative works). Fan described that in one piece, a little boy is crying because he doesn't want his dream to end, perhaps a reflection of the artist's own penchant for daydreaming and fantasizing.
Though the creatures of Claudio Romo are bizarre and at times, frightening, the illustrator’s distinct linework gives each a certain elegance. The Chile-based artist has produced a number of books carrying his strange monsters and plantlife (among them, the beautifully titled “The Book of Imprudent Flora”). Through often carrying no specific timeline, his practice has also extended into the futuristic, as evidenced below.
