There’s something undeniably cheerful about Christopher Silas Neal’s illustrations. Drawing from vintage aesthetics, his illustrations are nostalgia at its best. Using pencils, pens, brushes, gouache, and acrylic, he draws and cuts his characters, before scanning and layering them using Photoshop.
His work has been published in picture books, as well as printed on posters. But Silas Neal also regularly makes editorial art for magazines and newspapers including The New York Times and The New Yorker.
Amongst his inspirations, he mentions the picture books he read as a kid, music videos, and films, as well as his mom’s record collection. All those, have “seeped into his creative DNA,” according to him.
“The design influence comes from having worked as a graphic designer for three years or so before becoming an illustrator,” he added in an interview with AI-AP. “When I make a piece of art, I move shapes and colors the same way that a designer lays out a page. There’s a flatness to my images that stems from that graphic design process.”
We highly recommend you follow his progress through Instagram.
