Featured Artist

Aimee Sicuro received a BFA from Columbus College of Art and Design. After experience working as a line designer for American Greetings and a Flash animator for a once-budding dot-com in San Francisco, she packed her portfolio and headed to New York. Inspired by circumstance and in search of a new perspective, she took a job as a project manager and illustrator at a design firm in Soho. At Slover and Company she spent three years learning the business of art and the art of business.

Nuno Da Costa is a London-based, self-taught illustrator specializing in fashion and beauty imagery. Nuno’s illustrations fall mainly in two categories, color and black and white brush work but always retain their up-to-the-minute sense of style. His illustrations are hand-drawn and painted with water colors and gouache and then scanned, retouched and painted in Photoshop.

Jackie Besteman graduated from The Ontario College of Art & Design and has been a freelancer ever since. Her colorful work has been seen in many publications in Canada and the US. Going digital a few years ago has made illustrating even more fun and so the journey continues. She has recently started making patterns and this has affected all aspects of her work. Fashion and urban life are big influences as well as packaging with vibrant color and beautiful design.

Dorothea Renault was born in Germany and currently lives near Paris, where she studied advanced graphic and visual art. After having started work as a freelance art director, she started to focus on illustration in 2000. Her interpretation of women has been shown in collaboration with clients like L’Oreal, Printemps, Burton, Nivea, Gemey-Maybelline, Bourjois, and Musée Galliera de la Mode in Paris.

Alex Dalidis, a Greek artist, has been in the advertising business since 1994. He has served in all ranks of the Creative Department, working for several multinational and Greek agencies. Alex has also had his work displayed in art collections and dedicated art exhibits. Currently, he is freelancing in the fields of illustration and design. He attended AKTO Art College in Greece, and he specializes in cartoon, image manipulation and digital illustration.

Anni Betts is a professional illustrator living in Chicago, Illinois. She received a BFA in Graphic Design from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1998, and then worked as a graphic designer for eight years. Always most interested in image-making, she found ways to work her illustrations into her designs whenever possible. Finally, she branched off to follow her passion and become a freelance illustrator.

Bella Pilar’s whimsical feminine watercolor illustrations take a traditional medium and push it to it to a fresh, pretty new place. Her strong ties to fashion began with work in visual display and a career as a make-up artist before going on to her true love, illustration. Bella was trained in art and fashion at both FIT in New York and Massachusetts College of Art in Boston.

Penelope Dullaghan is an illustrator and fine artist who started her freelance career after a five-year stint as an art director. She currently lives in the teensy town of Winona Lake, Indiana, with her writer husband, baby daughter Veda, a dog and two cats. She chronicles her artistic development at her website, penelopeillustration.com.

Trisha Krauss lives and works as an illustrator in London. She spent 16 years working in New York City before moving to London. She is married to Antonio from Rome and has three step-children. In New York, she primarily painted with acrylic on plywood, and due to the lack of three-quarter-inch ply in the U.K., she began painting with watercolor and ink. She does have a stash of plywood in her cellar and continues to deplete the earth of fir trees in the name of art.

Lisa Henderling knew she wanted to be an illustrator by the age of six, when she would hide under the piano and draw women with pink hair. Though her show-business parents wanted her to continue in the family tradition, they soon realized that Lisa’s acting and dancing abilities were more than questionable so they acquiesced to her begging for art lessons.

Diana Marye Huff attended the Art Center College of Design and the School of Visual Arts. She began her career in New York as a fashion illustrator for Bloomingdale’s, Vogue, Tiffany, and Nieman Marcus. Known for her line work and pattern design, she then expanded her work to include package design, book illustration, and card and wrapping paper design. Most recently, she has returned to school to study oil painting. Ms. Huff says, “As an illustrator you always want to challenge yourself and keep your work relevant in an ever-changing marketplace.”

Pep Montserrat was born in Roda de Ter, near Barcelona. He has created illustrations for El País, La Vanguardia, The New York Times, Chicago Tribune, The Wall Street Journal, The Boston Globe, the New Yorker, Harpers’s Magazine, Travel + Leisure and other newspapers and magazines in the United States and Spain. He has also illustrated several children’s books, some of which have been published in Spain, France, Italy, USA, Switzerland, Brazil, Korea and Portugal. His work on children’s books has won numerous awards and honors.

Where do you live? Rome, Italy.

What medium do you use? Pen and ink and acrylics.

How do you stay inspired? Art galleries, magazines, nature and sometimes just walking around and people watching.

Do you work traditionally or digitally? Usually half by hand and half digitally.

What color combination are you most excited about right now? Mustard, teal, and chocolate brown.

If you weren’t an illustrator, what would you be? Maybe a dentist.

Leigh Viner was born and raised in Denver, where she still lives and works. She is currently expanding into fashion design, which has always been a large influence on her work, but she mostly creates from her emotions and life experiences. In addition to being an artist, Leigh works part-time as a freelance makeup artist. This skill gives her a better understanding of the structure of her subjects’ faces and influences the color in her art.