Taipei, Tawain based artist Hsiao-Ron Cheng, has a certain calmness and serenity about her personality that is reflected in her digital illustrations. Her earlier work, first featured in Hi-Fructose Vol. 24, portrayed wistful, fairytale-like scenes, but more recently, Cheng has shifted her focus to realistically rendered portraits of people in soft, pastel colors. For the past year, Cheng has elaborated on her portraiture by incorporating natural elements and detail in her subject’s expressions and fashion. She finds her greatest inspiration in the beauty, flora and fauna of our real world, and remixes it into something delightfully surreal. In her “Flora Portraits” series, she paints her subjects with rosy cheeks and candy colored hair, whose faces are obscured or partially hidden by flower blooms. Newer additions also play with this idea of abstraction or “obscurity”, such as painting a patch of color in front the subject’s face, creating the effect of ripples, as if the image were covered in a clear plastic, or adding the look of various textures like paper rips. Take a look at more new works by Hsiao-Ron Cheng below.
