Plants, by George Outhwaite
Welcome back to my weekly Twitter illustration round-ups. I'm just gonna get right into it. George Outhwaite is incredible. His work is dense, and is deeply invested in producing naturalistic light and texture. It's photoreal at a distance and then close up you get to appreciate the extremely intentional way each of these images is constructed. I always appreciate that his work is representative of the world in a way that never feels posed or constructed. This is what a meadow looks like, please appreciate the mundane beauty that you would probably otherwise overlook. I will likely come back to Outhwaite's work later because I think the way he handles mud and water is truly something to behold, but for now please enjoy this shaded field of plants.
You may note, from the first two entries here, and from my love of artists like Killian Eng, that my taste leans kind of maximalist. I love to have detail wash over me until it becomes neutral. A texture I can sink into and make sense of later. Death_Burger's VR rig here evokes both the body and existential horror of VR rigs that you get with something like Stålenhag's Electric State and the clutter of someone like Guillaume Singelin's sci-fi work that makes it feel ground and alive. I always prefer a machine design where I see the seams than something smooth. I want the complexity and I like the precarity and tension you get from so many exposed cables. I will say, though, I would love to see cyberpunk work push away from always using the cyan/magenta only palette (aka Bisexual lighting). It looks good, but it's becoming a shorthand for the genre in a way that flattens it to being alleyways at night and not places people actually live in.
Mint's death Tarot card (at least, I must assume it is tarot from the roman numeral) is very cool for a couple of reasons: The way the negative space of the white becomes like drapery, pulled back to reveal the illustration. The way most of this image is abstract but reads as representative. The value grouping that divides the image into easy to understand thirds. The way all lines point back to the face, eventually. These are all potential explanations, but the end result is just that it looks sick as shit.
This image is composed in such an interesting way that captivated me immediately. The perspective is non-traditional in a way that is so cool. You're looking up a hill and before you know it, the perspective shifts towards the top so that you're looking down the hill on to the other side and far away to the horizon. It's a beautiful technique to allow you to depict everything you wanted to show, to give a greater sense of the space of this place. I wish more illustration embraced rejecting realist perspective to create spatial effects like this.
This image was actually brought to my attention not through Waiji Choo's own Twitter (which does not exist) but by the account for the excellent drawing program, Procreate, who highlighted their work from instagram (where they have only 1,100 followers, which is ridiculous for how good this stuff is, go follow Waiji Choo). The way the lines waver from dark to white depending on the lighting of the image is really nice. I love the repeated rounded shapes that make the whole thing cohesive. You even get the same pattern and colours of the clouds repeated on the bottom of that floating island to the left. Waiji's environments are very cool constructions, with a an architecture that is both grand and whimsical and that has a great attention to colour and lighting and how that affects composition.
Professional Artist
- He/Him
- sifsweetman.carrd.co/
Illustrator for rpgs. 2D generalist and AD for games. Gray/Ace.
inquiries: si.f.swe@gmail.com
in reply to @SiFSweetman's post:
I adore these weekly roundups so much. A vast majority of people I follow on socmedia are illustrators for exactly this reason.
I'm so glad! I will be trying to keep them up as long as I have the energy and time to do it.
Thanks for doing these, you always dig up a huge breadth of stuff I'd never find otherwise
I feel like the cyan/magenta is just how people code "80s pop culture" now, not just cyberpunk but a specific kind of cartoon retrofuturistic vision from when technology was chunky and messy and the corporate VR space was a semimagical wild west shared by hackers and lowlifes instead of whatever bleached hell that freak Zuckerberg is shilling. Why those colors when actual 80s aesthetics were all about cramming as much brown in a space as possible IDK, maybe kids just looked at those goofy laser backgrounds in their parents' school yearbooks and decided that's what the whole world must've looked like then, but it's definitely about establishing a sense of an unreal fantasy space nobody actually lives or has real-world problems in
The animation in that Jo March landscape is wild, really gives the impression the hills are rolling like waves. or that you're speeding up and down those roads scattering geese and getting a bit carsick.
There are a lot of reasons its around, not the least of which is it's just a good colour combo, but the its become so built-in to that genre-space that I see blue and magenta together and I immediately categorize the image in a very specific way.
I really like these weekly write ups! It gets way too easy, especially with a format like twitter, to just let good art that has taken a lot of time and effort just become part of the scroll that gets little more than a couple seconds of attention before forgetting about it completely. I hope more people start spending more time with the art that has impacted them like you've done with these.
They've been really nice to do so I'm glad others are getting something out of it. I like talking about art I like, so much, and this gives me a chance to talk through in my head the reasons why I like the things I do like, even if sometimes the answer is just: "I just think this design is really cool."