Timeouts are lightning-quick interviews. Five questions to help you get to know the players holding court at Dribbble. Many thanks to Lea for being today’s interviewee.
Who are you? Let us know where you hail from and what you do.
Hello! My name is Lea. I grew up in a small town (Tienray) in the Netherlands. Through my illustration study at art school I landed up in a city called Breda. This is where I still live and work. Since 2012 I’ve been working as a freelance illustrator. I use words like warm, colourful, atmospheric, playful, crooked, mysterious, fairy-tale-like and imaginative to describe my style. I mainly illustrate for children but I love to use my illustrations for as many different projects as possible to keep myself challenged.
What are you working on?
I’m working on illustrations for a children’s wooden toy web shop, for a fair-trade chutney brand, on a secret project, on a children’s book about mindfulness and lots more.
Choose a favourite shot of yours. Tell us why it’s a favourite.
That would be Cranky Monkey. This was one of my first popular shots on Dribbble. It’s liked a lot by other people too, I always get super cool comments about this one and I really like how his expression turned out.
Tell us about your setup. What tools did you use to create the shot (e.g. hardware, software, pens, paper, blowtorch)?
I always start with making very tiny sketches on paper. I enlarge them on my computer, print the best one out and use a light box to make a nice and clean drawing out of it. I make my drawings with a mechanical pencil. When I’m finished I scan the final drawing into my computer and bring it alive with colour and texture in Adobe Photoshop. Working digitally gives me — as a perfectionist — opportunities to easily cut and paste pieces of my illustration, change color and add or undo things if I want to.
Choose a favourite shot from another player. Tell us why you dig it.
When I went through my likes on Dribbble I saw this work-in-progress shot again called WIP: Poem-Mobiles from Jeremy Holmes. It really shows the amount of effort that is put into illustration pieces sometimes. I love seeing WIP’s of other illustrators and artists, because it’s very recognizable and most of the time you only see the end result.
Find Lea at Dribbble, on Twitter, and at Lea Illustraties.
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