Sonny Ross’ Art is Something Else

“Say hello,” reads Sonny Ross’ Instagram bio, “let’s make something cool.” Indeed, his Instagram page is dipped in cool, with his illustrations being both original and, somehow, timeless. “I like to have fun in an image, even with a more serious tone,” writes Ross on his personal website. “Bright colors, chunky textures, and a lot of red brick recently. I honestly just love drawing for money,” he jokes.

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“Play” for @usfolkillustrate

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Though based in the UK, his creations have a worldwide reach, with some gracing the covers of top publications like The Washington Post and The New York Times. Other clients of Ross include The Guardian, Google, and The BBC. And with little over 10k followers on Instagram, it’s clear that his art strikes a chord with many people.

Each of his pieces begins with a sketch, “fast, postage stamp sized sketches,” he says in an interview with Inky Goodness. “These help me to see the piece as a whole, to really shape the composition, which can make or break a piece. When I’m happy with the basic imagery I do a larger sketch, take a picture of it, import that into an iPad drawing app called ProCreate, which is great for coloring and adding textures, I then choose between 2 and 6 colors usually to keep the whole piece solid and get to work. I export the finished piece to photoshop for any final tweaks then it’s done.”

“I never used to work digitally, basically doing everything in posca pen, because I don’t like the super clean-cut look of digital work, but when I started making my own brushes that looked natural I never looked back,” he says. “The difficult part for me is making something look natural, personally I feel it can lessen a piece.”

And talking about the process of becoming an artist he admits that “for the longest time I intended to finish school and go on to be a teacher, it didn’t occur to me that I could probably put some time into drawing and get better at it.” It’s a good thing he stuck with drawing.

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Closeup for those with tiny phones

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❤️

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