Hudson Christie on the playful course of behind his creepy illustrations
There is an unwavering sense of intrigue that permeates Hudson Christie's work. At first glance, you'll be forgiven that his game-dough-inspired creations are digital renderings, but go a little deeper and it's clear his illustrations contain more than meets the eye.
The illustrator, who grew up in Canada, describes himself as "less athletic, more fearful" and quickly found that he was interested in art as a career option.
Christie spent much of his time at Art & Design University's Ontario College exploring an aesthetic of his own. He started the graphic design course before switching to illustration and experimenting with different painting styles.
"After taking some very unsuccessful pictures with color for a few years, I reached out to whatever influence I could to see how I could get better at this," he says.
“My Gido – my die-hard Ukrainian-Canadian grandpa – used to carve hundreds of these little fishermen out of wood. I grew up in my house with a couple of them as a kid, so I think it was one of those early childhood visual influences that took root in my brain. At some point I realized that I should just try to make sculptures and photograph them as a finale. "
While this process is an integral part of Christie's practice today, the concept of 3-D illustration was fairly new when he started a decade ago, and shifting his approach proved to be a huge mental hurdle for him personally.
Fortunately, Christie's hard work has clearly paid off and he now receives regular assignments from New Yorker and Süddeutsche Zeitung magazines in Germany.
“The process was difficult, but I really enjoyed how my sketches were converted from 2D to 3D and then back to 2D as the final illustration. It's an overall achievement in terms of redundancy and it's still great fun, ”says the illustrator.
Inspired by the simplicity of visual humor ("A good gag in a movie is just an illustration on a huge budget"), Christie's ethos of taking pictures is based on drawing things in the simplest possible way and then doing them at the highest level of detail Medium like a photo or a 3D rendering.
“The trick with my approach is figuring out how to represent this 2D image in 3D space,” he explains. "This usually means using a forced perspective so that things stick to the objectively wrong perspective that I drew in my sketches. I would then build, paint, and photograph all of these objects."
Christie has also started experimenting with bite-sized animations that he plans to develop into more elaborate stop-motion films, and has most recently returned to his old university to teach the next generation of illustrators.
"I've already established such a routine with my illustration practice, but teaching is often a way out of my comfort zone. That's why it was especially worthwhile when it went smoothly," he says.
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