A character artist

ISSUE: 137

Inspired by his early fascination for comics, illustrator and animator Viplov Singh tries to use their secret language to communicate with his audience

How has your formal education in design fueled your career as an illustrator?

VS: When intended, illustration can be a complex visual form that can overwhelm your senses with beauty, abstraction and imagination. Design is the foundation of achieving such visual forms. My design education essentially trained my visual eye to see design and harmony in nature and all around. Shapes, values and colours are what make up the visual world. Understanding these fundamentals allowed me to view complex information and objects as simpler shapes, and put artillery of design principles into creating visual designs from imagination. Whereas design-specific knowledge is aimed at providing service in design, to me it’s an everyday tool to process and articulate information in a cleaner and much more aesthetic format.

What does it take for an illustrator to find his style?

VS: It takes years of constructive criticism and feedback from your fellow artists and viewers; and a deep understanding of what emotion you desire to communicate and how you desire to communicate it. In his book, animator Richard Williams says that an artist has 10,000 bad drawings that he must rid himself of soon! One has to view many different forms of media and art and eventually learn their limitations and be effective within them. One has to find a rhythm that flows like water. Finding your style is a long process but once you get there, it’s a gold rush. In full disclosure, I’m still in practice to develop my own style.

What are you currently working on?

VS: I’ve been working on a story for a few years. It follows the genre of epic fantasy/ mythology and demanded many years of research. For the past two years, it’s been in practical development as a game concept that will be in the hand-drawn style of animation along with elaborated painted backdrops. There will be a lot of magic, lore, history, action and love. of collective growth such as the one at Mainframe is a boon for any artist to be in. I learned that to make TV and film we need to organize ourselves as a very effective army unit and I personally thrive in such environments.

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