Welcome to the interview of Lois Van Baarle or better known as to the art community as loish.

I have followed her since I was just starting out in school. Her work is wonderfully creative and filled with a refreshing splash of color. She is an artist that I admire and have the sincerest respect for and I believe you should as well.

I can’t thank her enough and I hope everyone can look at her art and see it as a reference or a study mechanic to further build upon and improve their own skills.

Her Official Site: SITE

Her DeviantArt Page: DEVIANTART

Her Blog Site: BLOG

 

The Interview

1. You are one of my favorite artists for your bold use of color, shapes, and movement in your art. For those who may not know who you are, How would you describe who you are and what you do?

Thank you! I’m Lois van Baarle and I make digital paintings, as well as animation. Right now I’m working as a freelancer in The Netherlands, my home country.

2. You have been featured in ImagineFX, d’artiste, and in countless other places from tattoos, street art, and apparel. What is the next big goal for you as an artist?

I’m actually pretty much living my goal at the moment, which is to keep working as a freelancer and make a living drawing my own kind of artwork. Although I occasionally do commercial work, I like to focus on my own thing as well and hopefully have that play a bigger role in the future – in other words, I’d like to depend less on freelance work for income and more on print sales, private commissions and jobs that give me more creative freedom. I have plans to make two animated shorts and an artbook in the coming year or two, which I hope will be a success.

3. Your use of color is awe-inspiring, do you have a color palette you work from? How do you go about choosing your colors?

I do not work from a specific color palette. Choosing colors, for me, is largely an intuitive process. I just slap really rough colors onto the image and mess around with it until I like what I see. Using color editing controls plays a huge role in this process – hue/saturation, color balance, and replace color are the options I use most. I like to add textures early on in the process as well, which helps bring the colors together and add some depth.

4. Where do you pull your greatest inspirations from?

I am often inspired by other artwork that I find on the internet, through DeviantArt or browsing websites. I watch a lot of movies and animated films which are sources of inspiration too. I’d say my greatest inspiration is Alfonse Mucha, an art nouveau poster artist who made beautiful decorative portraits.

5. I watched your Animation short, Trichrome Blue and found it simply wonderful. What was is like working with art in animation and do you have any plans on working on future animation shorts?

Thank you! There’s not a lot of animation work out there in Holland, so I’m thankful that I get plenty of illustration work on the side. I have plans to finish the Trichrome project (the other two colors, Red and Yellow, have yet to be made) as soon as my schedule clears up again.

6. How do you enjoy spending your free time when not drawing or working on projects?

I like being outside, so I bike and jog a lot, something I also do to balance the amount of time I spend sitting at a desk. I also love to travel and spend a lot of time each year visiting friends or family abroad and going on vacation. And of course I love being lazy and sitting around browsing, watching tv or watching movies with my boyfriend.

7. I saw on your blog you received a cintiq and I was wondering your thoughts on it after working with a tablet? Do you find it easier, difficult, more fun, etc?

The cintiq is definitely better than a tablet because you are much more hands-on with the artwork. I found that adding detail and working with directional brushstrokes is much easier and more pleasant to do. It’s generally excellent for painting, the only downside is that it’s annoying for anything else (browsing, editing pictures, saving stuff) which makes me want to grab the mouse or my old tablet again!

8. I love movies and how much they can connect with a person, so what are are few of your favorites and what about them intrigued you?

My top three favorite movies are Donnie Darko, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless mind and A Clockwork Orange. I really like stories with a dark edginess and a surreal setting, which is why all of these appeal to me. I also like stories that play around with alternative methods of storytelling to involve the viewer more deeply in the universe that the movie presents. And all of these stories are sort of alternative approaches to sci-fi, a genre that I like but which can become very clichéd, so it’s refreshing to see some filmmakers take a more interesting approach.

9. As a digital artist professional what are some of the mistakes you see younger digital artists making?

I actually don’t really think there are too many mistakes a younger digital artist can make, since that is really the time to be going out there and drawing what you enjoy most without worrying about how it fits into a professional context. It’s a time to be prolific and have fun, during which you come up with a lot of source material that you can later re-work into a ‘professional image.’ One thing I would always recommend to young artists is to start promoting your work as much as possible before you begin professionally, so that your work is already out there and you might even have a fanbase by the time you start to present yourself as a professional. It definitely helped for me to already have a website and an established style by the time I graduated college.

10. Finally, what advice can you share to those aspiring to becoming concept artists?

I can’t really give too much advice since I myself am not a concept artist! I’m just an all-round digital painter and animator. If I’d have to come up with something, I’d say make your portfolio as varied as possible in terms of subject matter. It’s good for concept artists to be able to draw a variety of things and handle different types of projects.

Thanks for checking out this Digital Artist interview with Lois Van Baarle. Feel free if you have a question or comment to leave it in the section below!