Illustrator Chester Holme is obsessed with sports, which shows throughout his quirky illustrations. Based in southeast London, he graduated from Kingston University in 2015, and has since worked with publications and companies from around the globe. Amongst his many notable clients are brands like Nike, Red Bull Music Academy, House of Vans, and Twitter.
“I am pretty obsessed with sport, but the vast majority of football stuff I’ve made in particular has been commissioned,” explained Holme in an interview with wertn. “I do think that despite not necessarily feeling a compulsion to make work about it, I’m able to draw on my experiences as a fan which hopefully translates into a nice energy in those pieces. I’d like to think that sports fans who come across those bits of my work get the sense that they were made with an insider perspective.”
His illustrations are usually made with a limited color pallet and with an overflowing abundance of characters. “I’m really prone to over-drawing — putting too much down on the page and drowning the image in visual noise, and so I think using a single thick line-weight came about as a way of deliberately restricting the amount of marks I could make,” he explained. “It forces me to be smarter and more deliberate in how I draw and I’ve come to really enjoy the more rigorous process it requires.”
“Color is definitely something I really struggled with early on, but I’m feeling more and more in control of now,” he added. “I try to keep my eyes open to find interesting uses of colors as much as I can, and I’ve built palettes around color combinations I’ve seen in newspaper photos, films, supermarket shelves, and shop fronts.”
Check out some of our favorite creations of his.
