I was pleasantly surprised when I came across Hollis Brown Thornton’s striking and sentimental marker pen illustrations of old videos and cassettes on Poolga a few weeks ago. I love the colours and great attention to all the details in this work, including the hand-written labels on the cassettes. Hollis can also claim an eye-opening collection of wicked pen-drawn geometric patterns to his name, amongst other awesome pieces.

Having spoken to him, I found out an interesting and I’m assuming under-used illustration technique.

Hollis went to the University of South Carolina and graduated with a Bachelors of Fine Arts in 1999.

Since then, he’s shown in galleries, being currently represented by Linda Warren Gallery in Chicago, Illinois, Barbara Archer Gallery in Atlanta, Georgia, and if ART Gallery in Columbia, South Carolina.

Hollis uses Copic and Prismacolor markers for his various undertakings, as well as the Industrial Black Sharpies.

My work process is typically preparing the image in Photoshop, which is often a combination of photography and scanned drawings. Then I use a light box to reproduce the image on paper. As for canvas, the same process, using an opaque projector.

He’s just finished working on a drawing of this hexagon pattern containing the color spectrum within a diagonal grid pattern, which he’s covered with darker colours in an attempt to block out a large proportion of the colours.

It’ll end up being very dense.

Well here it is:

ⓒ Hollis Brown Thornton, 2009

Great work Hollis!

Regards, MoonApe

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