I need you to know that in spite of having done half a dozen or so of these, I literally have to go back to the most recent one I've done and check how I format the title every single time. The order of the words "Twitter", "Illustration" and "Round-Up". Gotta make sure.
All but one of these images are taller than they are wide, so I apologize in advance to folks using a wider screen to display these.
Wylie Beckert's combination of graphite and ink wash/watercolour is something I've long admired. I highly recommend looking at her site for a broader scope of it. I associate it with these undulating motions. Everything feels a little floaty, and a little like it's drifting, the way some Rococo paintings do. I love the really stylized skulls and the both the eel and figure feel like they are aesthetically influenced by Froud in their eyes and facial proportions. I love the way that Beckert has lightened up the sepias of the smoke and eel such that it forms a halo around the head of the submerged figure.
Lisa Heidoff is working a realm similar to landscape woodblock prints I associate with the Ukiyo-e art movement in Japan, in its subtle gradients and the way colour blocks are separated by black lines as well as the way light on water is depicted. I love how subtle the implication of drowned buildings is, here. The unnatural shape of the hills could be coincidence if not for the obvious presence of a castle or church spire. Really elegantly executed.
Nuri kabe-ya's work is often defined, for me, by absolutely colossal creatures, a great sense of scale and beautiful environments. The concept here is a pretty simple depiction of the legend of the koi fish that swims up a waterfall to become a dragon, but the execution is beautiful, angling the image so we get a clear fore, mid and background, giving us the fish scale, human scale and landscape scale as well as a story as we move up the image. The fish in the foreground, the fish swimming up the waterfall, a person awestruck, the final result.
If you have not been following NEZ's work before now let me say that if you like Greed, here, you will like NEZ's character designs that often give fantasy a Biblically-accurate-angel vibe. I really like the decision to to make the bottom lines of the robe that vibrant light red as it fades into darkness, letting us still see the folds of the robe as it crinkles. Great fabric work building folds throughout this.
I think what really sells this image for me is the way it is using the structure and language of a medieval icon. Icons, of a certain school, especially when designed for thin panels that would be used to decorate small areas of wall in the church, were tall, thin images. Long proportions and flat perspective. You can even see the hint of an eclipsed halo, also characteristic of a medieval icon. The hair here is the stand-out I think, but I also love the decision to make both the fire and the blood a single flat colour with no lines.
