Timeouts are lightning-quick interviews. Five questions to help you get to know the players holding court at Dribbble. Many thanks to Ilias for being today’s interviewee.
Who are you? Let us know where you hail from and what you do.
Hi everyone! My name is Ilias Sounas and I’m a freelance illustrator based in Athens, sunny Greece. I love creating illustrations, happy monster characters & short 2d animations. I also love doodling and sketching all the time. In spare time, I enjoy my friends, cycling and nice books of digital arts, history and philosophy but drawing is my passion!
What are you working on?
On a bunch of projects! I’m busy with a lot of infographics design/illustrations & editorial illustrations for clients, but I’m also preparing two nice personal projects. Firstly, a series of 100 Robots illustrations (named RoboMonsters) based on my Robots illustration shot At the same time, I’m trying to finalize a world of weird happy monsters and delicious sweets, an idea I’m having a couple of years but it’s getting closer to reality only now (a glimpse here). I hope both of these projects will finish in next months.
Choose a favorite shot of yours. Why is it a favorite?
There are a couple of them which I really like for various reasons. But I think my favourite is the shot from the Thought Bender illustration. I loved the idea of a character playing and bending his thoughts and dreams under the moonlight on a hovering piece of ground. Maybe, this illustration represents my thoughts as well, that’s why I like it :)
Tell us about your setup. What tools did you use to create the shot(s)? (e.g. hardware, software, pens, paper, blowtorch, etc.)
My all-time trusted tool is pencil, markers and dozens of sketchbooks, which I use to keep for years now, full with sketches and roughs. My first ideas are usually on paper, which I recreate again in Photoshop as a draft and then I draw everything using the powerful Illustrator and my Intuos tablet. 99% of my artwork is pure vector. Recently, I got a Cintiq, which is so amazing to use that I may switch some of my workflow back to Photoshop or maybe expand my style to a more painting look. But to be honest Illustrator is the most flexible software to use in all my projects, it makes my visions to come true!
Choose a favorite shot from another Player. Why do you dig it?
A hard question as I like dozens of Dribbble shots of various styles, techniques and art fields. But I will dig two in the illustration field, kind of retro-like style. First the eggplant and onions by Lydia Nichols. I love Lydia’s retro look in all her shots, but I like the composition, colours and wood texture in this particular shot. So simple but so beautiful.
The other one is Hotcakes by Anna Hurley. Great colour, textures, great drawing style; what else does a nice shot needs?
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