A creative at heart, Sarah Hartman does anything from painting to sculpting, but her main focus is dancing and illustrating. As such, her illustrations tend to feature ballet dancers, focusing on the ways in which they use their bodies. A San Francisco native, Hartman works at a nonprofit by day, teaches fitness at night, and makes tons and tons of art whenever the opportunity arises.
“Being a dancer gives you a kind of fluency in another language, in what parts of the body you emphasize, how they look, ways that they move,” she relayed in an interview with CreativeFluff Magazine. “I tend to always incorporate hyperextended legs and arched feet in full-body pictures because it’s what I’m used to seeing in the studio. Being surrounded by that for so many years really shaped my view of bodies and proportions. Probably in a very unnatural way!”
Her illustrations are vibrant, loose, and full of movement. “I definitely went through a lot of phases,” she said, describing her creative journey. “I read a lot of comic books as a kid; my brother and I would sit for hours reading collections passed down to us from our uncle. That influenced me for a long time and still does. I fell into more classical art and portraiture for a while, as I got more serious, and recently have found a kind of happy medium between the two.”
She especially likes the expressiveness of graphic novels, to which she adds more classical techniques of character developing. “I really love a lot of engraving-style work, the old detailed plates, and I’ve gone back to that influence lately,” she says.
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