Ariel Sun is a self taught digital illustrator born in China but has made a name for herself in New York. Her style of work is reported to be heavily influenced by certain techniques that are often found in Chinese Shanshui paintings. She works with alot more pastels and muted tones but is still able to create quite vibrant pieces with the way she plays with the different contrasts. She often experiments with the use of colour, light and shadows to bring a depth to her illustration without having too much detail. Her work is very simplistic with the use of empty space and minimal detail, she does this intentionally. She often depicts landscape’s or sceneries. She is said to create work that she feels tell a story with the intention of trying to get the viewers to feel a connection to or to draw out certain moods, or better said in her own words “”I like to interact with my audience by making them curious about the rest of the story, and encourage them to come up with their own interpretations,”
Ariel’s work reminds me of a digital form of lino as you can see the different layers that complete the image which i really love the style of. The palate she works with is very pleasant to the eye and i wanted to incorporate the use of her pastel tones as well as the block colours in the background.I The use of shapes and lines to break up each shade and colour not only ads a sense of depth but also gives that really nice clean finish. The work often doesn’t have too much going on yet it still speaks for it self. Ariel’s work really helped inspire and influenced the style of illustration i decided to go for with my own work. As i do digital art myself i have experimented with many styles before but this was a lot more simplistic compared to what i usually went for.
Although we have very different topics and affects we want the piece to have on our individual audiences i took her approach in art style of keeping the details minimal. I want to do this because i feel as though a lot of the time in art we focus a lot and almost imerse ourselves in the details and components of an art piece and often get lost and distracted to the message being relayed, if any. So in turn me taking a more minimal approach i would hope for the art to be more on the message rather then the way it presents.
You can see the similarities in the styles and the way i was influenced through her work. I wanted to work with a similar style palette of a lot more muted and darker range of colours as well as the use of the block back grounds.
Although the influence is there i still made these pieces my own in where i incorporated some some shading and more details on some aspects of the piece.