A feast of colors comes with this last pick by our Playgrounds Eye Candy editor Romee van der Schoot. Meet Jill Senft, freelance illustrator and painter based in Berlin.
Romee: “Jill Senft just makes cool shit. I love everything about it.
She is a Berlin based illustrator who explores her craft with paint or pencil in personal projects and client work, for example magazines like New York Times and Berliner Zeitung. Most of her works are paintings turned into digital images, but she also explores various different applications of illustration like (wooden) sculptures and products (Crocs and t-shirts). On her Instagram she also blesses us with her sketchbook pages full of wonderfully crafted pencil drawings. These are truly my favorite works of her.
In my opinion, she figured out the perfect mixture of aspects in visual work. There is a realism in the paint strokes (since these are actual paintings) but a surrealism in the content. It’s colorful, dynamic and expressive with a touch of absurdity.
Jill uses exaggerations in proportions and facial expressions of the characters. It provides a certain simplicity as the elements are very much based on shapes. But you can definitely feel she intentionally plays with these aspects in her work.
What I like most is that there is often a story or a feeling of motion to her static images which make them so interesting to look at for a longer time. I especially love the pencil sketches in her sketchbooks that she uploads to her Instagram. But my absolute favorite is the angry horse painting.”