Based in Toronto, Canada, fashion illustrator Annie Naranian has always been a creative soul. Her illustrations are playful, quirky, and sometimes exaggerated. These characteristics are deliberate, and Naranian’s goal is to make other people happy through her work. “I want my audience to find happiness and laughter throughout my art,” she writes on her website. “And this is mainly because I think we take life a little too seriously sometimes.”
Inspired by all things fashion, when she’s not in the studio, you can find her getting lost in vintage clothing stores. “My interest in vintage fashion can be seen reflected in my art, because I think much of contemporary fashion is indebted to what has come before it,” she remarked in an interview with I Love Illustration. “And it is that very connection my art seeks to explore: the ways in which the methods of contemporary fashion are related to or are different from the techniques of the past.”
Her toolbox includes both traditional and digital tools. Mostly working with digital-based media, when she isn’t using her iPad she typically works with ink, pastel, acrylic, and watercolors.
“There are many things around me that I am able to get inspired by,” she adds. “These things range from clothing, books, old magazines, and textiles. The sketches of old masters that I look up to are Christian Lacroix, Karl Lagerfeld, and David Downtown. What I appreciate about the three of these artists (and fashion designers) is their playfulness with figure, shape, and color. I find playfulness to be an intriguing element in the creation of art because it is able to evoke a story by capturing the fundamental parts of the image without getting too bogged down by the details.”
Take a look at some of her quirky takes on the fashion world:
