A selection of work by Toronto-based artist and illustrator Lia Lepre. Her current medium of choice is coloured pencil as Lepre feels it allows her to softly render an image, sculpting it through subtle tonal gradations and shifts of shadow and colour.
“Photographic references are a big part of my practice. I look for images that feel like snapshots that I can expand on and give new life to through drawing. Sometimes these snapshots are widely circulated images that make the rounds for years on Tumblr with a long-forgotten and far removed source. They are often extremely low-res and I spend a lot of time interpreting chromatic aberrations, pixelation and digital degradation and translating that into my own visual vocabulary. I enjoy combining images from the web with scenes from my own life to create a composite narrative–a hybrid of fiction and reality that is representative of my lived experience.”