I am a (mostly) digital artist and specialize in vector images of animals, plants, and sometimes landscapes. Over the years, I have developed a clear, no-nonsense style. In my work, the purpose of a drawing determines how detailed I make it. However, even when a drawing is just a single line, I always strive for accuracy.
An illustration, any illustration which I make, is a simplification of reality. An attempt to show the most important characteristics of an animal, plant, or landscape in dots and lines.
What differs, is how many details I draw. More details mean that the object looks more realistic. But it is also more work to make a detailed drawing.
My reptile drawings are an example of the amount of detail that I love most. Small dots almost resemble individual scales, while I still simplify the background to larger patches of uniform colours. Such a detailed illustration typically takes me one to several days to make.
Simply said, vector images are digital pictures that can be resized to any dimension without quality loss.
“Classical” images and photographs are raster images, which consist of pixels. When you enlarge them a lot, they become grainy.
In vector images, colours are programmed as points, lines, and polygons with various dimensions and shapes. Vector images can easily be converted to raster images. The other way round is more work and often involves tracing raster images in illustrating software.
Vector images are often preferred for printed material, however, not all computer programs can open them. For instance, for this website, I had to convert my vector illustrations to raster images, otherwise your browser could not show them!
In practice, this is the drawing style that I use most often. I make simplified vector images, which still show accurate colours of plants and animals while leaving out most details.
This drawing style is a compromise in order to work faster. Depending on the subject and the amount of research that I do as a reference, I can make a number of such drawings on a single day.
In order to ensure accuracy, I mostly work after my own photographs, which I make specifically for my illustrating work.
Identification keys are meant to help identify animal and plant species. Such keys typically consist of a number of questions, in which each question has two or more possible answers. Usually, it is necessary to look at specific parts of animals and plants, for which only technical names exist. The purpose of the illustrations is to clarify what to look at.
For these illustrations, it is necessary to use only the bare minimum of details and keep everything else as much as possible the same. But, it is still needed that the drawings are completely accurate. they are often black-and-white because even colour can distract from the characters which are described in the text.
It takes a relatively short time to make such drawings, but I often do a lot of research to ensure accuracy. Also, it is not uncommon that I redo the same drawing numerous times, on basis of instructions from a specialist
I spend countless evenings making these drawings with a black fineliner of paper. In fact, this black-and-white “stippling” technique is what got me hooked on illustrating in the first place.
For these drawings, I mostly used my own colour slides as a reference and I even designed a method to project slides downwards, on the drawing paper. Simply tilting an old slide-projector means that the ventilation cannot work and the light bulb overheats and burns through!
I write in past tense because, when I make such drawings nowadays, I do it digitally. The result looks practically the same, with the added benefit that it becomes resizable.
Such a drawing takes me anything between 4 hours and several days to complete.
Occasionally, there is a need for humoristic drawings which enliven poster exhibitions and education displays. Like my other illustrations, they are inspired by nature. However, there is no need for accuracy and I often smile when I see my cartoonish drawings. Do you like them too?
The price of my illustrations is usually between 25 and 250 Euro, depending on complexity, style, licensing conditions, and research time. For larger series of drawings, I can offer a discount. It is always helpful to indicate your budget when we discuss what I can do for you.
The price of my illustrations is usually for a specified use (for instance for use in a book) and includes:
