A combination of analog and digital work, Marijke Buurlage’s illustrations are vibrant, light-hearted, playful, and very much enjoyable. A sort of childhood dream, basically. Based in the north of the Netherlands, she’s graduated from Minerva Academy Groningen and has since been working as a freelance illustrator.
Her work includes editorial illustrations for magazines, children’s books, book covers, posters, apps, and e-books; but she also loves working on self-initiated side-projects, with her two most favorite things to draw being animals and botanicals.
“I combine analogue and digital work for everything I make,” she shared with The Monster Project. “I first draw everything by hand with a brush and black ink, and then I arrange all elements in Photoshop and color everything digitally. This works perfectly for me, because I like both the roughness of hand-drawn details and the comfort of digital working and being able to make changes easily.”
With her work bold and vibrant, she admits to collecting color inspiration. “I take lots of pictures of cool color combinations (my last one was of a red onion with a baby blue potato peeler while cooking dinner), and I experiment with the use colors a lot,” she says. “I think that actually takes up most of my time while working on something new – determining what colors I should use to make the artwork look perfect!”
“If you put everything you’ve got into an artwork, then your personality shines through almost every time,” she says. “I often wished I could live in one of my own illustrations or turn them into clothes and wear them.”
Enter some of her playful worlds below:
