Si F Sweetman

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.
I Speak Astronomy by Death_Burger
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. Death, by Mint
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. Middle Dimson by Jo March
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. Island in the Sky - Night, by Waiji Choo
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.