Every roughly-edged form, dash, splatter, and creative mark in Marijke Buurlage’s work is placed with an attractive display of confidence and determination.
Everything in a composition of hers is strong and graphically striking.
As she tells us below, Marijke pays special attention to imaginative and uncommon colour schemes.This is immediately apparent when looking through her portfolio as she seems to come up with new and clever ways to play with colours with every illustration.
It’s this wonderful relationship between shape, colour, and bold mark making that results in images that so effectively draw you in.
Check out some examples of Marijke’s work as she talks materials and process.
My name is Marijke Buurlage, I am 25 years old and I live in Leeuwarden, the Netherlands. I graduated as an illustrator from Minerva Academy in 2013. During my time at artschool, I only worked with pencils, markers and acrylic paint. I never really tried to combine those techniques with digital ones. But when I became a part of the Vera Artdivision after graduating, this changed.
Vera is a music venue that provides promotional gigposters for their concerts that are all screen printed by hand and designed by the people of this Artdivision.
I never really tried any printing techniques before, so this challenged me to change my work method and build up my illustrations differently. I now had to limit my color palette and think about how I would create different layers in my illustrations.
Surprisingly, these ‘limitations’ worked perfectly for me! I started combining my hand-drawn elements with digital editing. And this is how I still build up my illustrations: all the elements are drawn by hand, scanned, and then colored and arranged digitally afterwards.
Color is probably one of the most important aspects of my work, and I spend a lot of time deciding on the right color palette while working on my illustrations.
Whenever I spot an unusual but interesting color combination, I try to recreate it digitally as soon as possible and use them in my new artworks.
© Marijke Buurlage, 2015
