Editorial Illustration: Lotta Nieminen

I'm back! For now, anyway.

I actually have a queue of posts that are waiting to be published here from my main tumblr blog. In truth, I was going to post this onto my tumblr but I just find it easier to do word-based posts on blogger. 

My post for today is about editorial illustration; at uni I get to make the choice between photography and illustration and - as you can see - I decided to go down the illustration route. I just prefer drawing to taking photos, even though it's a lot easier to take photos!

This post was actually going to consist of a list of illustrators that I was interested in, but because the illustrator below was so interesting I have now thought just to do a series of posts of inspirational illustrators - and maybe photographers - instead. This is actually going to be included in my uni work because I do need to include it in my research of different styles... I guess that this is hitting two birds with one stone!

Lotta Nieminen - http://www.lottanieminen.com/

Suez Environment

Originally born in Helsinki, Finland, Nieminen studied graphic design and illustration at the University of Art and Design Helsinki and the Rhode Island School of Design, and is now a freelancer based in New York, U.S.A.  

Nieminen has done many editorial illustrations, and after browsing through a few of them I found this one that was part of a series "Suez Environment". Suez Environment is "a French utility company

which operates in the water treatment and waste management sectors." - quoted from her website. 

This illustration above is a perfect example of her style; she uses flat colours so there is a lack of perspective, and yet the way she places specific elements (like the hill) creates some sort of depth. The characters within her illustrations are quite simplistic so that their facial features aren’t really obvious, which is a style that is reflected in Impressionism where painters like Monet would focus more on the light and shading than facial features. 

What I also noticed is that she has used a texture so that it looks slightly grainy and less “flat”. This could be something I could use in my illustrations to create more, well, texture!

I’m not really good at doing backgrounds so I really admire the detailing in hers, despite the lack of things such as shading. She has paid a lot of attention to tiny things such as the windows, lines in the buildings, and even the little "turrets". 

From this example I can also assume that she uses Illustrator, and I really admire her for that because I’m not that good at vector images at all!

The things that I have pointed above are reflected in all of her illustrations; her flat colours, lack of perspective, characters with no faces, a lot of detail in buildings... Here are some of her other pieces. 

That's all for today I guess! Thanks for reading.