Micah Lidberg is an illustrator, designer, and typographer with a enviably clean and detailed art style. His flat spaces and colors remind me of Japanese prints, albeit with a more random doodle aesthetic.

The abundance of interesting subjects in his pieces is explained by his partially stream-of-consciousness process; "Before I set out to start working on a piece, I imagine what the general layout is going to be. In that way, I do plan an environment for hidden gems to live in. However, all the little moments and stories don’t become a reality until I get down to the actual, final drawing. They take form when I begin to address each little square inch of the piece."

Angry Cloud

The surreal and oftentimes creepy mood Micah enjoys implementing is what most draws me to his narratives. Though his wild colors and characters seem influenced by psychedelics, he clarifies that "all of my work comes from my sober imagination." And there is definitely a much more sober quality to his pristine, economically-silhouetted shapes.

Rendlesham Forest, 1980

Micah's hand-drawn details contribute a richness of texture that I find really inspiring, but I think color (which he adds digitally) is what best pulls together the atmosphere of his work.

My Favorite Things

Bobby Chiu is a Canadian illustrator with a broad array of vibrantly colored and humorously stylized digital paintings. He works as a freelancer and has created character designs for movies such as Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland, but he's best known for (and funded by) his online art education project Schoolism.

My favorite aspect of Chiu's work is how he combines soft, airbrushed rendering with subtle textures that compensate for the stale cleanliness of digital painting. Furry pelts are one of his specialties.

The funny narratives Chiu is fond of depicting are also what draw me to his work (his standalone character designs are appealing but less inspirational). He maintains a childlike lens in his paintings by putting endearing characters in ominous but not explicitly threatening scenarios.

Art like Chiu's is all-age appropriate and conceptually straightforward, which makes it prime material for commercial use. So while it doesn't provoke any deeper analysis, it is definitely a standard by which I would judge the technical professionalism of my own work. I would love to steal his lighting, texturing, and coloring techniques for myself.

Alessandro Pessoli is an Italian-born American artist who creates paintings, drawings, and sculptures in equal volume. He is interested in the intangibility of history and its openness to subjective interpretation, especially in how contemporary viewpoints change and renew the past. As such, he draws on historical references in much of his work, along with meaningful symbols that represent topics from religion to sexuality.

h.d-p, 2005/06

Of all his works I prefer those that seem to be of humans partially formed; ones that lack detail in a decaying corpse kind of way. They are disturbing not only for their inhuman appearance but also because of their strange colors and patterns, like sickly and subdued psychedelic posters. The work is definitely more emotionally raw than telling of any idea (some call them narratives but I find them closer to being imaginative portraits of nobody in particular), because what's on canvas is foggy and rough to the point of being an eclectic riddle with no real context. I really love the weird feeling they give off, and I think the ability to elicit interest with shapes so unclear is an admirable skill.

Testa in Amore, 2008

Pessoli's paintings may be rough but they feel very complete, either because he establishes his focal points very well or because no one can say what the end result of his abstractions should look like. I'd like to try his method of sketching with paint to see if I also could be satisfied with something so lacking in rendering.

Assassini Che Mangiano, 2005/06