Featured Artists: Claire and Audrey Nelson

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Q: What  does your art look like?

Claire: “Ours are each a little different. Mine’s very stylized. A lot of drawings are of people. Sketchy lines, and usually it’s blue or red pencil with lead pencil over it.  It’s kind of weird, but in a good way.”

Audrey: “Mine’s also really sketchy.  Kind of cartoonish, but not super cartoonish.  It’s also mostly blue and red pencil. It’s a little less stylized than Claire’s.  It’s mostly people. Yeah, it’s a lot of pages full of a bunch of different, various faces.  I don’t do a lot of full body drawings.”

 

Q: What kind of music do you listen to when you’re drawing?

Claire: “It really depends on what I’m drawing at the moment.  If I’m drawing something calm I’ll listen to some kind of indie folky something rather and if I’m drawing something energetic I’ll listen to Arcade Fire or something louder or more energetic than that.”

Audrey: “I have a lot of different stuff that I like to listen to.  My favorite band is Metric and I listen to [them] a lot.  I don’t really know what genre of music I like; it’s really a wide variety.”

 

Q: How do you make your art?

Claire: “I have two different was that I do art.  One is that I do it digitally sometimes and then I do it in my sketchbook and usually if I’m doing it in my sketchbook I’ll just sit doodle with my pencil and then if I’m doing it digitally, I have this digital drawing tablet that hooks up to my computer.  And then I can use it in Photoshop or other paint programs and draw on the computer.”

Audrey: “That’s how I do it too. We both have the same process.”

 

Q: Have you ever worked on pieces together?

Claire: “We haven’t done any collaboration things yet, but we’ve been talking about it for a while, but we haven’t gotten around to it yet.  I think it would be really fun.”

Audrey: “We always talk about that we should draw something.  Like I draw it and you color it, something like that.  It hasn’t ever happened, but we’re probably going to do something like that at some point.”

 

Q: What’s your procedure when you draw?

Claire:  “I will usually be drawing in my notebook the same way that [Audrey] does. And my digital process is that I’ll draw a sketch, sometimes I’ll do a clearer sketch over that I’ll do line art which is just a dark dense line and then I will go in with color and shading and then I’ll color parts of the line art so it blends in with the colors a little bit better and that’s it.”

Audrey: “Generally, if I’m drawing visually, I’ll do a sketch layer first and then go over that in a new layer.  And make a line art layer.  If I’m drawing in a sketchbook I’ll have a blue or red pencil and I’ll put a sketch down and usually I’ll go over the sketch with cleaner lines, in regular pencil.  I don’t generally color things if I’m doing them in my notebook.  But if I’m drawing on the computer I generally will color it and add a bunch of lighting and stuff.  It’s not exactly the most interesting process. It’s just sketch, color lines, then shading.”

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