My Favourite Artists

Hi all, 

I've been asked a few times to make a post about my favourite artists and biggest artistic inspirations, so this is it!

I have numerous artists I admire and inspire myself from, and listing them all would probably lead to this post being miles long, so I'll be focusing on the ones that haven't changed after many years. My tastes vary, and have changed over time and depending on my artistic direction of the time, but some works and people have stayed dear to my heart, and my admiration for them has only steadily grown the more I evolved and developed as an artist myself. 

So here are my all time favourite artistic influences. (In no particular order within their own categories)

The social media handles of any artist with a handle will be in brackets, and if I can’t find a social media for them, I will link to their website, or if not even that, I will link to any relevant information available. 

PAINTERS AND ILLUSTRATORS

Most of my favourite artists are artists who work traditionally. I do love digital art also, but it doesn’t speak to me as powerfully as traditional art does, although that does not mean I don’t appreciate it also. 

✦ Jean Giraud aka Moebius
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Giraud 

Jean Giraud was a French artist who‘s work was more often than not featured in french and belgian “bandes dessinees” (Bandes Dessinees are a specific to France and Belgium, and are a type of comic book). His style is characterised by surreal concepts, often colourful, always rather strange, with fine outlines and flat colours. I first discovered him in the bande dessinee Blueberry, which is some of his more realistic work, but I only really started loving his work when I delved deeper and discovered his more surreal and fantastical pieces and books, such as Armagh and The Eyes of the Cat.
My love for his work has never changed, and I often reached out to his pieces for inspiration and motivation. 

✦ Shaun Tan
http://www.shauntan.net/ 

Shaun Tan is a Australian artist who also creates very surreal work, although his pieces are generally (from what I have seen) more anchored in real life themes and ideas, and his work often has a lot of symbolism attached to it.
The first work I discovered of him, and still my favourite to date, was The Arrival, a wordless graphic novel, that touches on the theme of immigration and refugees, and tells the story of a man who has to leave his family behind in order to find them a better life. It is one of my favourite works of art ever, and touches me in so many ways. I have gifted a copy of it to so many of my loved ones, but for some reason, I still haven’t gotten myself a copy! I’m not sure why that is...

✦ James Jean
http://www.jamesjean.com/ 

James Jean is a recent addition to my list of favourite artists, as it has taken me a while to love his work. His style is very colourful, very “graphic” (in the graphic novel sense) and almost cartoonish. His themes are very surreal, almost abstract at times, and feel both extremely different and somewhat familiar to the work I like to create. His work is often both saturated with colour and still somehow dark and intriguing. 

 ✦ Joao Ruas aka Feral Kid
https://www.joaoruas.com/ 

Joao Ruas is a Brazilian artist, who’s work is a big inspiration for my personal style.
He works with very little colour, and his themes are very surrealistic, and often somewhat dark and cryptic. He often features animals next to human figures, and his work evoked emotions in me that no other artist on this list does.
His pieces inspire me both in theme, style, and aesthetic. 

✦ Sean Andrew Murray
http://seanandrewmurray.com/ 

Sean Andrew Murray is an American artist. I believe that on top of his personal work, he also works as a freelance concept artist and illustrator. His work is very fantastical, with a lot of characters, creatures, and world design. His sketches are what inspire me the most. His sketching style is so concise yet narrative, and he is so incredibly skilled at building strange creatures and detailed worlds, that I marvel every time I see even the tiniest sketch from him.
In short, he is absolute sketchbook goals for me XD. 

✦ Gerald Brom
https://www.bromart.com/ 

Gerald Brom has been a long time inspiration of mine. His work is also work fantastical than surreal, and he often features isolated characters in minimalistic compositions, with high contrast and a dark atmosphere. I often reference his work when I want some lighting and composition inspiration. 

✦ Wieslaw Walkuski
https://www.walkuski.link2.pl/index.html 

Wieslaw Walkuski is a Polish graphic designer and artist. It is clear that he inspires me a lot once you see his work. He created a lot of poster for theatres and plays, and I am always in absolute awe of his skill and imagination. His work is darker than I want mine to be, but his symbolism is incredible, and I can only dream to one day reach even a sliver of his skill. 

✦ Jeffrey Alan Love
https://www.jeffreyalanlove.com/ 

Jeffrey Alan Love is one of these artists that I admire the work of because it feels like it comes from another world. His style is so minimalistic but so incredibly efficient, his skill at understanding how to make a composition work, how to give off a certain emotion, how to create movement, with only a few strokes, blows my mind. I am incapable of that level of intuition, and his pieces make my heart sing. 

✏ Here are a few Honorable Mentions (In brackets are their social media handles, if they have one, or their website, if they have one instead):
✧ JAW Cooper (@jawcooper on insta)
Who doesn’t love JAW Cooper’s crisp, flowing lines, and witty humour? And her puppy buts.
✧ Allen Williams  (@i_justdraw on insta)
His was one of the very first art books I bought for myself. His skill is out of this world, and his art if dark and surreal and all the yummy things I love.
✧ Natalie Hall  (@natalietattoos on insta)
I believe Natalie is a tattoo artist by trade, and her style is beautifully graphic and dynamic. Her characters and creatures are stylised in a way I always dreamed to be able to make mine, but I don’t think it’s me, really, so I’ll keep enjoying vicariously through her.
✧ Alessandro Sicioldr  (@alessandro_sicioldr on insta)
His work is so surreal and dark, and he is incredibly prolific.
✧ Eliza Ivanova  (@eleeza on insta)
Eliza does a lot of animation work I believe, but I am more familiar with her sketches, which are the epitome of skilful and expressive. Another one of those sketchbook goals people, haha!
✧ Kim Jung Gi  (@kimjunggius on insta)
Does he need any introduction? Who doesn’t dream to be able to draw like Kim Jung Gi?
✧ Wylie Beckert  (@wyliebeckert on insta)
Wylie is another one of those artists I drool on when I look at their sketches. She’s incredible, and her hands in particular inspire me greatly. She is the one who showed my how much value a good hand could bring to a piece! I support Wylie on here, and I also own one of her art books.
✧ Karl Kopinski  (@karlkopinski on insta)
Similarly to Kim Jung Gi, Karl is one of those incredible artists who can sketch pretty much anything anytime from imagination. He’s incredible.
✧ James Gurney  (@jamesgurneyart on insta)
James Gurney is a master of gouache and colour and light in general, and is always really generous with his knowledge. He has an awesome YouTube channel. I love his dinosaurs.  
✧ John Ken Mortensen   (@johnkennmortensen on insta)  
You might know him from is monster doodles on post it notes? John Ken Mortensen Works a lot in black pen, and creates brilliantly dark illustrations often featuring all sorts of monsters.
✧ Rovina Cai   (@rovinacai on insta)  
Similarly to Jeffrey Alan Love, Rovina Cai has one of those styles that is so perfect, so emotive and effective, and at the same time very stylised and almost minimalistic. Part of me wishes I was capable of having such a style. Part of me knows it isn’t me either.
✧ Hannah Lavender (@hannah_illo on Insta)
Hannah is incredible with gouache, and I drool all over her pieces because her work is just stunning. And so different from mine.
✧ Tran Nguyen  (@mynameistran on insta)  
Tran’s work is very different from mine, it’s very whimsical and ethereal, very feminine and soft, but also so surreal and imaginative!
✧ Benjamin Bjorklund and Nick Runge  (respectively @benjaminbjorklund and @nickvrunge on insta)  
Those two artists have fairly similar watercolour painting styles, that I find incredible. They overlay flat washes of colour to make a piece, and it makes their pieces look so dynamic and alive! I learn a lot from simply watching them work.

✏ Here are a few artists I currently follow avidly on social media (mostly Instagram) :
Dory Whynot   (@dorywhynot on insta)  
Dory is incredible, and her work is so consistently good.
Miles Johnston   (@miles_art on insta)  
Miles has similar themes to me, although we have very different techniques and ways of representing our ideas. He is also on another skill level, haha!
Autumn Chiu   (@artchiu on insta)   
Autumn (who also own SketchbookCo on Etsy, the shop my beautiful book-looking sketchbooks come from) creates the kind of work I admire for the same reasons I admire Jeffrey Alan Love and Rovina Cai. That intuitive genius of making pieces that look minimalistic but are so wonderfully emotive.
Serena Malyon  (@smalyon on insta)    
Serena‘s work with gouache is fantastic, and her handle on colour and light never ceases to amaze me!

I’m sure there are tons of other artists that I am forgetting, so I might update this post as I think of more, but for now, that’s it for illustrators. :)

CONCEPT ARTISTS

✏ I didn’t put these artists in the illustrator category because their work doesn’t tend to be as narrative as illustrations, and are more along the line of character and creature design. 

 ✦  Rob Bliss  (@robblissart on insta)  is a fabulous English concept artist, and although I do love his character designs, I particularly love his sketchbooks and personal works, as they are weird and dark and twisted and I love them. 

 ✦  Carlos Huante (@carlos_huante on Insta) is an incredibly skilled creature designer. His imagination knows no bounds, and his skill is simply mind blowing. I find his pieces particularly inspiring when I am trying to break the mould of realism in my figures, and want to find new organic forms and movements. 

SCULPTORS

This is the category I KNOW I have a bunch of people to add to, but for the life of me I can’t think of most of them right now. So I’ll definitely have to add to it when I remember the peeps I love!

 ✦  Yasuyuki Katayama  (@yasuyuki_katayama on Insta)  is a Japanese sculptor who creates pieces that meld the human form with wood. The result are these surreal creature-like figures, that I personally find incredibly poetic and inspiring. 

 ✦  Louise Bourgeois  ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louise_Bourgeois ) isn’t exclusively a sculptor, but her sculptures are what I mostly love about her work. Her spiders especially. Her work is dark, surreal, feels so full of meaning without being obvious. I love it. 

MISCELLANEOUS 

 ✏ There are a few artists out there that I LOVE the work of, but am not sure what category they would go into, so they’ll go here. 

 ✦  Susanna Bauer (@susanna_bauer on Insta) creates delicate sculptures by sewing leaves. Her work is incredible, it’s so delicate and intricate, I am in love. 

 ✦  I suppose Misha Gordin ( http://bsimple.com/home.htm ) would belong in a photography category, but since I don’t know of many photographers, he goes here. Misha is a Latvian conceptual and surreal photographer, who does a lot of work with groups of people. His pieces are generally quite dark, with no colour, and more often than not, feature humans in various surreal compositions. 

 ✦  Tyler Thrasher  (@tylerthrasherart on Insta)  grows crystals on dead things. It’s awesome. I would absolutely love to be able to buy a crystallised something from him one day. 

 ✦  Hayao Miyazaki everything. I love everything about all of his movies, I could go on and on for ever about how much I love his films, but honestly, you’d get annoyed at me, haha. Suffice to say, he is, and has always been, a MAJOR influence in my work, and in my life in general. I click with his worlds so intensely, it’s everything my inner world has always been, that he deserves to be up there with Moebius if I was to rank my artistic inspirations. 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hayao_Miyazaki 

That’s all for now!

I find the work of other artists to be an enormous source of inspiration for my own work.
There is something about seeing the vision and sensibility of another creative that lights a fire in me, and not only wakes my desire to create, but also fuels my imagination and my emotions, and helps me reshape my mind so as to access all the hidden troves of creativity that my brain possesses.
It has taken me years to get to a point where I feel like my ideas flow and where I rarely find myself in an inspiration rut. I was always very imaginative, and probably have always lived more in my head than in reality (which I suspect might also be due to trauma at an early age, but that's another topic altogether), but never quite knew what I wanted to do with my creativity. It’s only recently that I started finding a voice that speaks to me in deep enough a way that I feel at ease with my own imagination enough to find inspiration easily. 

These are the artists I could think of so far. I am sure there are more, and I’ll update this post as I think of them, but I’d say this is already a pretty good overview of my taste in art, and I’m sure you can see why I love most of these artists, and how they have influenced my own process! 

I’d love to know which of these you already knew, if any of them are also your favourite, who your favourites are, and if you discovered any new people in this post! 

I hope you are all well lovely people,
Take care,
M