Gina Kiel is an illustrator based in New Zealand and is represented by Sydney based illustration agency [highlight-red]The Drawing Book[/highlight-red]. Gina creates artworks combining wild imagination with a feminine touch and always a personal expression. She has an ability to balance the very same [highlight-red]paradoxical themes[/highlight-red] in an arguably more challenging subject matter. Illustrators, painters and photographers love portraying tigers, because it’s an opportunity to explore the nature of a wild animal with so much beauty, pattern and poise. Few people can master it though as they tend to overweight one theme over the other so that either the cat lacks its wild nature or it appears too brutish and clumsy.
Gina is obviously not one of those people. They are her favorite animal, her astrological sign and represent the very themes that she passionately paints from her heart. Tigers introduce a new challenge as whilst no one can criticize an [highlight-red]illustration of a dragon[/highlight-red] for not looking “like a real dragon”, people are fascinated by tigers and most of us have poured over pictures of them at one time or another. So our eyes are a little more critical in regard to what looks right.
Another challenge in Gina’s illustration work was the use of [highlight-red]calligraphic ink and watercolor[/highlight-red], the mail problem with these are very stubborn mediums, when it comes to process and final format. They are in their element in the arena of fine art and personal expression, but when it comes to [highlight-red]commercial art[/highlight-red] there is a requirement for an image to work across a plethora of different media and satisfy a host of decision makers. Gina Kiel managed to emulate the two mediums digitally as she created her final illustration. But it wasn’t just her professional skills that won her the brief; it was her personal flair for the feminine form as well. Scroll down and absorb the crisp and deftly applied color throughout her working pencil and final [highlight-red]illustration[/highlight-red].
