Lois Van Baarle

"I've been drawing since the day I could hold a pencil, and started teaching myself to draw digitally in 2003. Although I was born in Holland and have dutch nationality, I've lived all over the world, including the United States, Indonesia, France and Belgium. Upon finishing high school in 2004, I studied animation in Ghent (Belgium) for a year and then moved back to my home country to study animation at the Hogeschool voor de Kunsten Utrecht (HKU) in Hilversum. I am currently a freelance illustrator and animator located in Utrecht (the Netherlands) and living with my boyfriend and fellow animator Arjen Klaverstijn."

I am a big fan of her artwork and style with digital painting. Like her I mostly draw female figures and exagerrates the volume of the hair. It's very cartoon-like but the brush strokes are very soft and subtle. The choice of colours are bright but balance by the bold lines.

She also does step by step process of her artworks. This is easy to achieve when painting digitally because of separate layers. I also did a step by step of one of my hair themed pieces, only difference is mine aren't digitally but hand drawn.

As for my process, it goes in this order:

Sketch the desired image with a pencil.

Go over the pencil with the watercolour pens.

Colour in accentuating the areas with stronger colour shading.

Using a brush and clean water, brush over the colour to blend.

This process takes long when hand drawn but digitally it takes no time at all and have more tools to play around with. I could improve my hair themed set on Corel Painter X3 to finalize them even more.