Biography

There is only one reason I always read the biographies of my favorite artists: I am looking for the answer to how and why they painted, how they developed their technique, and how they found their inspiration. Yes, there is a certain talent present at birth, but the path followed by each artist, drawing more and more paintings, can be found in their biography.

I wonder sometimes how I learned to draw beautiful vector illustrations in a way that look as if they are not 100% done in Adobe Illustrator without further improvements in a raster program. Some people do not believe that my illustrations are all vector graphics and claim they cannot be created entirely with vectors. Someone said that I must be “out of my mind” to do such work in Illustrator, but most people were simply surprised that vector art can be so alive.

Often I get asked how I create my art. And every time I find it difficult to answer with something concrete. If I start telling people my biography, they do not understand what I want to tell them. “Hey, I asked about your technique, and you tell me a story about your mother being a painter”. But this is the only real answer to the question and my specific technique.

My mother is an artist, and she had a very big impact on my work. She paints with oil on canvas, but she is distinguished from other artists by her colorful work, as well as using a palette knife technique. With the help of a piece of metal she manages to draw realistic and clear colors, prescribed patterns, faces of people, and show volume.

I was ten years old, when I had my first art exhibition. But I did not have the patience to paint with oil or acrylic, I wanted to paint with computers. I was given a small drawing tablet for our computer. At this point however, the computer we had was very slow. Photoshop kept hanging, and drawing something significant with it was impossible. Adobe Illustrator on the other hand was very easy on the resources, and technically, vector had no limits – increase and export it to any size you want. The only problem: how to draw with pleasure? How to deal with the constraints? But I did not see me limited in any way by the program. I looked at the pictures of my mother and thought all her paintings can in the end be disassembled into small movements with the palette knife or individual brush strokes. So, I can draw the same in vector, learning to draw from more general to more complex art.

I have always believed, and still believe, that if there is something I cannot draw, I need to improve and refine my technique. It is just a matter of skill. Therefore I don’t think it is correct to say “you must be crazy to draw complex art in Illustrator”. I, as well as people working with raster programs, enjoy my work. Just by chance I have chosen to work with vector graphics, not knowing how “normal” vector art usually looks. Early on I began to receive emails from people enjoying my work, so my sister decided to show my work to the creators of Adobe Illustrator. They were surprised by the capabilities of their own program, and so I got featured on the Adobe site and was commissioned for a design showing off a new version of their program.

Work done in Illustrator can be printed in any size without loss of quality, and I was able to make it more beautiful, which gave me exclusivity and fame.