Digital Art Influences

 Vanessa Rivera / The Life of Aivax

    Vanessa Rivera is a digital artist whose work I first found from the cover art for Adobe Photoshop 2020. I looked her up after seeing it because I loved how imaginative and fun it was. I found her/ her families Instagram, and it was full of similar projects. 
  

      Her work blends the real world in photographs with imaginary places she is able to create in Photoshop. She also uses her kids and family as the main subjects, which I think makes it more personal and shows off her love for what she creates even more, as it's something that brings her family together. 

       

           You can tell she does a lot of work to make her photos look naturally lit, with lighting that makes sense for the various scenarios. This helps to suspend disbelief a bit and live in the fantasy worlds that she creates. 

            While she makes each piece with many different photos and digital drawings pieced together, her focus on the details, filling the entire frame also helps to sell each scenario. Instead of just kids in a flying car, they are packed down with bags, escaping a stormy evening into the clouds. 

            So fun and creative, I always enjoy seeing what they come up with, and where their journeys take them. 

Nicole Guice

    I am mainly familiar with Nicole Guice from her cover art of Panic! at the Disco's album Death of a Bachelor. It's another example of someone blending photography and digital art/ drawing. 

She's a very talented illustrator and does a lot of portraits. While I'm not sure exactly what her method -is for her works similar to this album cover, I think adding the sketch/doodle-like layers on top of the  photograph in this case, helps to blur the lines between reality and dreams/hallucination or superficiality, which are some themes conveyed in the album. The bright whites and colors, plus strong lines of the drawn images create a lot of contrast with the dark photograph as well. 

Tnaya Witmer

When I first watched the Hulu show Only Murders in the Building, the title sequence caught my eye more than anything. The animation tells a story that hooks you into the series even more every time you watch it. 

Tnaya is a freelance art director and motion designer whose main work is in title sequences. Title sequences are something that sometimes get overlooked, but can have a major impact on the overall visual design and style of a series or film. 

While the technical aspect of her animation is very impressive, creating a seamless sequence that shows off the inside and outside of this building, giving the viewer a glimpse into the mystery, I think the overall design is very effective for this as well. The simple color pallet and perspective of the viewer getting a cross-section view is a great way to show off the characters in their personal environments. But also leaves the sense/feeling or of missing out on the details that we can't see through the windows, reflecting the mystery in the show and how little the characters and audience know about each other.