Whilst doing assignment 4 I was looking for different editorial artists and found Laura Callaghan who I decided to a bit further research into. I chose her work as she has done editorial work previously but mostly because I LOVE her style, its so new and funky looking, I also feel we have similarities in our styles and what we draw.
Laura is an Irish Illustrator based in South London, her work is hand drawn using a mixture of watercolour, indian ink and isograph pen. Her clients include The Guardian, Adidas, MTV and The Sunday Times. Her work mostly features female characters and intricate scenes that you have to scan closely to see the small details, it’s the details that drew me to her work I think her style is so unique and fun it really caters to a specific audience e.g. younger crowd her illustrations are of trendy young people so it seems fitting that young people would be her demographic. Laura uses watercolour and other paints such as gouache in her work to get that bright vibrancy to her work, I’m unsure if she maybe tweaks them in photoshop after they are finished as I can’t find that kind of information anywhere, I myself like to use watercolours but never get the sam outcome as she does her colours are built up to be opaque I’m not sure if I’m too impatient with them to give them a chance to dry and build the colour up but after discovering her work I’m inspired to invest in some new watercolours and try again! The colour choices remind me of somewhere tropical using such vibrant vivid colours making them very commercial, definitely something I would buy a print of to put up in my house, I think she must have taken a lot of time and done lots of trial to get different colour palettes that work and to make them her own unique styles to make them recognisably hers. Laura’s work is also compositionally inspiring to me, the busier artworks are my favourite and can’t believe that its all hand drawn and must have taken a long time to paint such detailed intricate designs. Everything is alway put in the right places aswell so that everything has a purpose in the image. Even when the image is just of one person it is taking up the whole image space and she has laid the drawing out so the eye is directed to the most important parts of the illustration first. I’m definitely inspired to study her work a bit more and pick up some more composition tips as all her works look so well rounded and finished nicely. I think our work has similarities as we both draw people a lot, but her figures and face have a simplistic line quality which is really effective and she shades with darker hues of colours she is using whereas I tend to use a lot of cross hatching with pens to indicate shadows although recently I have started to shade with colour but looking at Lauras work I’m definitely inspired to try and shade with colour more often and keep outline to a minimum.
Images taken from- http://www.lauracallaghanillustration.com/About
Jade Prictoe 