You don’t have to love comics to enjoy Nadia Hafid’s comics-inspired illustrations. Neatly organized, her minimalist illustrations are used as a storytelling tool, relaying Hafid’s thoughts and feelings into pastel-colored images. Her style is fairly straight forward, based around geometry, straight lines, and flat colors.
Growing up, Hafid imagined she would be a painter, but having graduated in Fine Arts from the University of Barcelona, on top of a degree in Arts Applied on the Wall from the School of Arts and Crafts (Llotja de Barcelona), she decided to take on illustrating instead. “I’ve been drawing since I was a child,” she relayed in an interview with wertn. “I grew up thinking ‘I want to be a painter artist!’ When I finished school I did mural arts courses, but I came back to the origin of my passion: drawing.”
Nowadays she works as a freelance illustrator, collaborating with different publications and brands. “I love composing those elements that appear in my drawing,” she says. “I also love to draw human faces, but I simplify them until they look like symbols; or human figures in the simplest way, so become almost abstract shapes representing very concrete ideas.”
As for her inspiration, she admits to drawing references from cinema and photography. “I think it is very inspiring to be influenced by different disciplines besides your own,” she says. “This helps you to grow and to understand your own work.”
Take a look at some of her work in the gallery below:
