Lesley Smitheringale Fine Art

Featured Artist - Klaus Haapaniemi

There is a beautiful ethnic, folklore and fairytale quality about this illustrator’s work and his illustrations are totally devine.

Finnish born, now London based artist, Klaus Haapaniemi became interested in illustration after seeing some well-designed Russian animations on TV when he was only eight years old. After graduating from Lahti Design Institute, Klaus lived in Italy where he worked as a key print designer for Diesel and Diesel Stylelab. Klaus’s long list of commercial clients include print collections for Clements Ribeiro, Cacharel, Marimekko and Levis, plus store identity for Selfridges, an ever expanding range of his own published books plus ceramics and wall tapestry collections.

“Kauris”

“Oravat”

“Castle Wall” Mural

“Hauki”

“Taika Cup Blue”

Klaus’s website is under construction but you can see more of this work at Big Active

Posted in Featured Artist
By Lesley Smitheringale

Featured Artist - Ronald Kurniawan

Stunning attention to detail in these illustrations showing a vivid imagination and lovely sense of colour.

Ronald Kurniawan graduated with honors from Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California. Inspired by ideograms, syllables, letterforms, beasts and heroic landscapes, he slowly but surely continues to create a visual language where the wilderness and civilization could merge happily together. With the belief that the sublime and nuclear age could coexist, he paints romantic environments and breaks the quiet scene with juxtaposed imagery taking the shape of icons and letterforms. He currently lives and works in Los Angeles where he paints meticulously and happily accompanied by his pug Ruffles, an avid artist himself.

“B Wary” plansponsor

CHILICILI Cover for vodafone in the Czech Republic, where all fairytales come together.

“X” Steps of Ronald’s painting - acryclic on wood

“A Buffoon on an Island ” acrylic on birch/ 5′ x 3′ / roq la rue galler

Ronald Kurniawan’s Website

Featured Artist - Carlo Giovani

This young Brazilian graphic designer has produced a novel range of design products and I particularly admire his paper animals which are quite stunning.

I like to work with different medias and techniques, mixing them to create new ways to represent ideas and concepts.

“Paper Forest” poster “In nature, everything turns into more nature”
All the animals and plants were made with paper techniques

“Chinese Tea Box” We decided to give to some ordinary packages a new face based on the product inside, creating a kind of toy-pack, a beautiful object, that people can not put on the trash, but take it to them, reusing the pack. In this case, a beatiful chinese girl opens her mouth to offer you a delicious jasmine tea.”

Carlo Giovani’s Website

Featured Artist: Louise Robinson - Art & Ghosts

This artist is incredibly talented and her digital collages have a kind of spooky, fairytale quality which I love. She has a store on Etsy where you can purchase her work and a beautiful blog which is a visual delight.

“I like to make pictures, lots of them. These include digital collage, surreal photomontage, drawing, painting and illustration. My most favouritest themes include dreams, dolls, spectres, fairytales, mythology & nature.“

Arielle and Thumbelina

Storybook Adventure and Dulcimer

Featured Artist: Emeric Trahand

Beautiful attention to detail in these works by young French designer Tksh who is doing rather well for himself.

“Still on the run” is the online portfolio of 26 years old multidisciplinary designer Emeric Trahand. Also known as Tksh, Emeric has established himself as a freelance graphic designer in
France in mid 07 and has already been commissionned by clients such as EMI Music/Sony BMG/ Knorr/TBWA Toronto/Exo7/BBDO Montreal/FPLQ/Suzuki/The KDU/4 Westmount Square/The Canadian Globe & Mail/Zoumarmada/Vin d’Alsace/Bak mag/Ins2one/Unicef/Apag … and more.

Website

Featured Artist: Samuel Ribeyron

After a stay in Japan, this extremely talented French illustrator has produced a series of charming watercolours of little Asian characters with stylised square heads for a children’s book entitled “Pi, Po, Pierrot” The attention to detail is beautiful and they are anything but simple - the subtle shading and colours, clever composition, decorative patterns and the ability to capture the essence of the culture and characters in the scenes is outstanding.

some illustrations from the Pi, Po, Pierrot book

Samuel Ribeyron’s blog and website

Featured Artist: Johanna Uhrman

This Finnish artist’s illustrations done in Photoshop are beautiful with a superb feel for colour, layered textures, whimsical scenes and lots of attention to detail. See more on Johanna’s website.

Nihon no yume 00

Mangrove Heaven

Toads in Trouble


Going to the Jungle Party

Featured Artist: Jacqueline Pytyck

Jacqueline Pytyck is an illustrator, a designer and an OCAD graduate, with an extensive passion for life and image-making. Her whimsical gallery contains an array of optical illusions, and conceptual pieces that focus primarily upon human nature and social relationships. Artistic influences include Japanese woodblock printing, Inuit art, Ukrainian textiles, and the surrealist work of Zdzislaw Beksinski. Her greatest inspiration stems from her friends and family.

Clockwise: Wandering Eye, Two Faced, Hot Head, Broken Heart

Fishy

Jump Illustration Website

Posted in Featured Artist
By Lesley Smitheringale

Featured Artist: Alberto Cerriteno

I am a designer and illustrator from Mexico City who likes animation as well and enjoying whatever looks good with the right colors. Currently working as Senior Art Director at marketing and design agency in Portland, or and who also makes artwork that could be digital or painting in his “free-time”.

l to r: Bear close-up, Coco, Grincket

l to r: Jack Frost, Never Dawn Never Dusk, The Nest close-up

l to r: The Melancholic Cat, Kong-Fly

I absolutely adore these illustrations and they are so sophisticated yet quirky with rich decorative patterns and textured overlays not to mention the stunning and perfectly chosen blends of colours. I take my hat off to you Alberto - a new favourtie artist of mine and I will certainly be keeping an eye on this extremely talented Mexican illustrator.

Website Blog

Featured Artist: Luc Viatour

This has got to be one of the most attractive looking fish I have ever seen and it is called a Mandarinfish. This photograph (which appears in wikipedia) and the others here were taken by Belgian photographer Luc Viatour and his work, I think you will agree, is outstanding. See more on Luc’s website.

¢ Luc Viatour GFDL / CC