Award-winning author and illustrator Christopher Silas Neal deserves the hype. His picture books are both playful and observant, his style – retro and naive. Aside from writing, he also designs book jackets and posters, and regularly makes editorial art for magazines and newspapers including The New York Times and The New Yorker.
His influences are a mix of mid-century art and design and pop culture from his youth. “The picture books I read as a kid, music videos, films, and my mom’s record collection seeped into my creative DNA,” said Silas Neal in an interview with AI-AP. “The design influence comes from having worked as a graphic designer for three years or so before becoming an illustrator. When I make a piece of art, I move shapes and colors the same way that a designer lays out a page. There’s a flatness to my images that stems from that graphic design process.”
His tools include pencils, pens, brushes, gouache, and acrylic as well as photoshop. “I draw, cut and paint various black lines and shapes, scan them into my Mac, add color in Photoshop, and arrange them in layers until it looks like a picture,” he explains.
His advice to other creatives hoping to jump into the field of illustration? Take risks. “Take creative risks like trying something new without any guarantee you’ll be good at it. Take personal risks like moving to a new city or approaching someone you’d like to meet. And finally, dream big. Let reality scale things back rather than your ambition and imagination.”
Take a look at some of his playful work in the gallery below:
