New Artists from Illustration USA Join Workbook

Lee Hodges comes from deepest, darkest Kernowfornia – also known as Cornwall. The sea and coastline have always been a part of his life, and today he lives on the foothills of Dartmoor, in Devon. In addition to his vibrant, mixed media illustration work, Lee is a DJ and runs club arts nights in the Southwest of England. He loves to explore and experiment with a range of creative media, but drawing was his first love and that’s what drives him as an illustrator.  

Judith van den Hoek absolutely loves watching documentaries about Karl Lagerfeld, Valentino and Isabel Marant. They’re a great source of inspiration for this fashion illustrator who uses simple yet expressive line work to capture each garment or collection she draws. Based in Gouda, in the Netherlands, Judith is also inspired by magazines, blogs and books. She does editorial commissions as well as working for fashion labels, and private collectors. Beyond her passion for drawing, she loves the outdoors and cycling, and says that if she weren’t an illustrator she’d probably like to work in a zoo.  

Born in France, Claire Rollet spent over 20 years in London and has recently relocated to Amsterdam in the Netherlands. London will always hold a very special place in her heart but for now she is loving cycling around discovering the Dutch capital. In her spare time she loves sewing; each garment she sees as a mathematical problem waiting to be solved. Music accompanies Claire in her work and she has daytime and night-time playlists. Todd Terje, Kiki Gyan, Mashrou' Leila and Cosima are out when the sun’s up, and at night she listens to the likes of Hercules Love Affair, Gotye and Baloji.  

Looking at one of Kathryn Rathke’s line-based illustrations can be a bit like working out a puzzle – was it created using one fluid and continuous line, or many? According to the Seattle-based artist she owes her drawing skills to family connections. Her grandmother taught her to draw and supplied her with books by Arthur Rackham, Maurice Sendak, and William Steig, while her father was president of an advertising agency and used to bring home reams of paper for her to practice on. She has lots of other creative interests too. She learned to make leather masks in Italy, enjoys German experimental theatre, and sometimes throws parties where her friends must act out vignettes found in a 1912 children’s book called Entertainments for All the Year.  

Alexandra Baker grew up fascinated by both science and drawing, and like so many other medical illustrators when she first heard about the field it was a eureka moment for her. Based in Asheville, North Carolina, today she’s a leading medical illustrator, working for an array of book publishers and magazines, illuminating some the latest discoveries in medical science. Texture and atmosphere are important elements in her work. She recalls the day when her father – who worked with electron microscopes – first showed her scans of the surface of a leaf and the proboscis of a butterfly. Today she uses various kinds of nature photography as sources of inspiration. Underwater images help her create the right mood when depicting the human body from the inside, and pictures taken in caves can help with bodily cavities. The branches of trees are reminiscent of arteries, and nature’s textures and patterns provide endless fascination for an artist who is dedicated to getting the details right. She’s also inspired by the artists Stephen Gilbert and Frank Armitage, both of whom are medical illustrators. Outside of her art, she loves to run and took up training five years back. Since then she’s completed seven marathons and more than 20 half-marathons. A keen reader, she says her house is like a secondhand bookshop.  

Soft and skilfully painted, Dena Cooper’s fashion illustrations also offer moments of striking contrast and intensity. Her lifelike models look as they could walk right off the page and join in with your conversation. With a background in fashion design, Dena is now a leading New York illustrator with a growing list of industry clients. Transplanted into Brooklyn from Fredricksburg, Virginia, she loves New York and Fashion Week in particular. “I’m very influenced by street style that I see around the city, specifically the effortless chic that so many New Yorkers exude walking down the street.” Further inspiration comes from designers like Marchesa, Dior, Delpozo, and Viktor & Rolf, but Dena also loves reading, running, a good cup of coffee or a glass of wine.  

The award-winning cartoonist and illustrator Henry Smith is based in Salt Lake City, Utah. He’s an artist who was captivated by cartoons at an early age and never grew out of them. Now, they’re his career and he’s made a name for himself designing unique characters that are full of humour. “A great character can be designed if you pay attention to the silhouette. Is it something we've seen before? I like to use geometric shapes in fun ways to see if I can get more interesting characters, and making my characters as weird as possible, while still being cute and approachable,” he says. There’s certainly a 90s vibe in his inspiration cabinet – Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, the Powerpuff Girls and SpongeBob SquarePants are to be found there, along with classic video games like Pokemon Blue and Super Smash Bros. With a graphic design background, he’s also influenced by mid-century modernism. Henry is a keen volleyball player, listens to Country, Rock and Rap, and enjoys the company of his wife and their two sassy dogs.  

Splitting her time between Chicago and Los Angeles, Sunny Gu is an artist who’s curious about culture. She loves to look for beauty in everything around her and then recreate it in her art. It certainly shows through in her work, which is full of colour, glamour, fashion and ornamentation. Sunny was born in China but emigrated to the US when she was 13. She’s loved drawing for as long as she can remember. Her nickname is ‘Bee’ because she’s obsessed with flowers and if you look inside her wardrobe you’ll be overwhelmed by the colourful floral prints and patterns inside. She has plenty of accessories to go with the garments - again, they form important elements in her illustration work. Her overall aim is to preserve the beauty she sees around her.  

London based Illustrator Rohan Eason works predominantly in pen and ink. He is best known for his stark black and white imagery, which plays heavily on the roles of composition and view point, and the balance between intricate detail and dark or light space. His work has become widely used in book illustration and more recently in advertising, where his uniquely hand crafted style stands apart from the more typically used digital art forms. Although art has run very clearly through his family and his childhood, it was only after leaving university and a painting degree that he decided to pursue illustration as his preferred discipline. Rohan loved the work of Aubrey Beardsley and Arthur Rackham as a boy, and this devotion to and pursuit of the beautifully hand drawn line followed him into adulthood. His portfolio now bursts with the magical and fantastical scenes from dreams to nightmares, from real life to imagined creations, but all with the same single grounding fact, that of beauty and balance.  

Londoner Stuart Holmes is now based in Australia’s creative enclave of Melbourne. Trained as a graphic designer, he felt that illustration allowed him much more freedom, and he developed a flat vector style that has remained popular for well over a decade. Stuart is addicted to vinyl and wherever he goes seeks out a record crate to dig through. He’s also a huge fan of Southampton FC, and led the team out as a mascot back when he was seven years old.  

Crowded urban scenes, architecture and maps – the things you see today in Mike Hall’s artwork go back to his creative beginnings. As a child he used to love drawing images full of people, and maps of imaginary towns and even entire countries. He says this might be because he grew up in the new town of Harlow in Essex – the modern, pre-planned, post-war setting gave him an interest in architecture, topography and mapping from an early age. Of course, he liked comics and picture books too, and today he’s also inspired by William Hogarth, Gustave Doré and Wenceslaus Hollar, as well as MacDonald Gill, an artist who embellished his map illustrations with all kinds of colourful motifs. He loves everything Hispanic, which is why he recently relocated to Spain.  

It’s impossible not to love the comic book style of Arielle Jovellanos. Fresh and light in tone, it’s set to take the graphic novel aesthetic into all sorts of new areas and Arielle is clearly an artist with a passion for visual storytelling. Her big breakthrough came with her 2015 high school romance School Spirit – 60 pages of high quality artwork. The publication received an Eisner nomination, which is the pinnacle in the world of comics. Today the artist is working with a range of top names in publishing, and looking for new people to collaborate with bringing stories to life. A Filipina-American, Arielle grew up watching Disney movies and drawing her own variations on Sailor Moon in the margins of her schoolbooks. Today, she loves musical theatre, collects playbills, and her biggest influences are the manga artist Rumiko Takahashi, the book Howl’s Moving Castle, and Studio Ghibli’s movie Kiki’s Delivery Service.  

Butcher Billy is a Brazilian illustrator with a fresh approach, who loves to slice up ideas and imagery in popular culture and reassemble them in unique ways. Juxtaposing everything from Wonder Woman and the Watchmen to Morrissey and Breaking Bad, his work is ironic, humorous and very postmodern. His subtle questioning of pop culture using pop art as his medium is a juxtaposition in itself, yet in their own unique way all his images seem to make sense. In addition to his illustration work, Billy is a creative director in a digital agency. He lived in the UK for a while, and has travelled widely. With seemingly endless influences at his disposal – including Banksy, Steve Ditko, Shigeru Miyamoto, Malcolm McLaren and Andy Warhol - Butcher Billy never runs out of moods and concepts to explore. “I like to create freely and then realise bits of an artwork are influenced by the mood of a movie by Tim Burton, the brushstrokes of a piece by Salvador Dali, with a soundtrack from an early album by David Bowie,” he says.  

Feathers, scales or fur – they all come out perfectly when painted by British nature artist Andrew Hutchinson. Living on the North York Moors, Andrew is so passionate about nature that he’s a part-time ranger with the Forestry Commission and monitors the activity of adders and certain bird species in his area to help conserve them. Being out and about, experiencing nature, is a crucial source of inspiration for his work, and Andrew loves the area where he lives. The way nature, as the ultimate recycler, reclaims and transforms objects with decay is endlessly fascinating to him. He also enjoys looking at Jurassic fossils and Oriental antiques.  

Elena Viltovskaia is a fashion and beauty illustrator based in Toronto. Since graduating from the Ontario College of Art Design Illustration program Elena has been perusing a combination of passions including illustration, on set styling and art direction. Her diverse body of work incorporates a variety of media, from watercolor and ink to 3dimentional objects. She often develops concepts for editorial as well as commercial clients and occasionally teams up with a photographer. Elena's lucid, dreamy and textural approach to illustration received multiple recognitions from industry peers including American Illustration, Creative Quarterly, CURVY magazine. Her work has appeared in North American and European publications.