Featured Artist: Elizabeth Schuch

When asked who my favorite artist was at the beginning of the semester, I totally spaced on Elizabeth Schuch's name, only remembering the name of her company, Immortal Longings. I first encountered Schuch's works while visiting Skakespeare's Globe Theater in London a couple summers ago. She works in production design for film and stage, concept & storyboard art for film and animation, and illustrations for the Shakespeare and Opera collections. You can see her portfolio here.

For the purpose of this post, however, I'd like to focus on her illustrations, since these were what first captivated me. Though she has worked with different mediums, she seems to favor watercolor and inks as her primary medium for her illustrations. This lends a light, transparent quality to many of her works.

Many of her works are monotone, using tints and shades to help create a sense of 3-dimensionality. The colors help to evoke appropriate emotions, with cooler, darker colors often being used for the tragedies, and brighter, warmer colors for the comedies.

All her illustrations are stylized, representational depictions, with some being having a higher level of abstraction than others.

In her illustration for Titus Andronicus, the figures and architecture are easily recognized, but the lines are jagged, unfinished. Details are hurried; color looks as though it were hastily splashed on. All these elements generate a feeling of violence and chaos (though the skeletal arms and blood red color contribute to that feeling as well).

Her architectural sketches show a strong sense of perspective and a the effective use of shading and line. These particular illustrations appear dark and foreboding due to her extensive use of a use of low-value color (primarily black), with only a few highlights. The contrast between the white and black is visually striking.