Citizens Of The Jungle - Part 1

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In this series of illustrated portraits “Citizens Of The Jungle”, the goal is to question about our place as humans in the world. We do concentrate more and more in the cities and progressively losing the connection between nature and or initial primitive “wildness” and “freedom” as we fall more and more on a “Digital and 24/7 connected” way of living.

These portraits are meant to present how we tweak and modify our world and modifying ourselves at the same time.

It also represent our inner struggle to free ourselves from this connected world that is taking more and more space in our everyday life.

We live in a society where the information is bombarded in every minutes, adverts, social media, we could say that we’re all living in some kind of “Digital jungle”.

The images are bold and saturated , they must appeal the eye and catch the viewer's attention at all cost, almost like a “war of image” to win the favors of the consumer. Their goal is to impress us and create some “awe” moments of beauty and awesomeness but we tend to be .

In these graphic portraits are meant to be a kind of “color mashup and experimentations” where we escape from reality and we find a kind of digital connection with nature and its diversity. The mission is to share through Art an ecological message by giving nature back its richness and complexity that never warned off but that us humans tend to forget too much these days.

T-Rex Girl

source: Pinterest

Portrait with the crocodile

Photo reference: Lena Smirnova on Behance

Portrait With The Bats

Reference picture: Joshua Rawson Harris - Unsplash

Woman With The Wasps

Reference picture : Lena Smirnova on Behance

Portrait With The Leopard

reference photo: Justin Bettman on Behance

This Project was also a great opportunity for me to experiment on my graphic style and my approach to portraits. For each portrait I wanted to create a specific color combinaison and color contrasts.

The process was always the same, The portrait as the central element, I was building layers of various elements, animals, insects, plants and constructed the composition from this. The goal was to have movement /fluidity and complexity in the images.

For those interested here is a short video with various steps and stages of the painting and my process to create one of these portraits.

I'm painting initial shapes with flat colors and then , using some clipping masks I'm progressively painting volumes, lights and shadow, adding colors and refining the shapes.

I've separated the full process into 8 steps but of course it's a progressive work, it took me a lot of hours to add colors, volumes, shadows and textures.

I didn't used any photographic material or texture into these illustrations. I only use pictures as references for drawing and painting but never include photos in my images, everything is drawn and then painted digitally.

Special thanks to Lena Smirnova , Justin Bettman & Joshua Rawson Harris for their cool work & portraits photographies I've used as references to create these illustrations.