Living in a military family, fourth-year student Kaelan Depape knows what it is like to move around, so staying in one place to complete her BFA in illustration was a challenge that she found fun and the stability allowed her to put in the time and effort into honing her illustration skills as she aims to be a visual development artist for TV and movies. The amount of exposure to different cultures she has gotten from being in places such as Japan and Hawaii has definitely influenced her work for the better, and she uses her knowledge to help brainstorm ideas for her amazing pieces that often feature fun and interesting creatures.
Kay Nielsen, a popular 20th-century Danish illustrator, is one of Depape’s favorite artists and inspirations. As an homage, she created a piece of two birds as a study of one of Nielsen’s masterful works. Depape worked with a tight color palette consisting of warm tones and experimented with methods of digital painting that were new and unfamiliar to her. After finishing the piece, Depape contemplated doing a full series of illustrations using this style as she found the color combination pleasing. The shape language and overall composition of this piece are incredibly pleasing, making it a very successful study for Depape.
Based on an Aesopica, a fable by ancient Greek storyteller Aesop, Depape illustrated this piece with the intent of improving her overall painting and rendering skills. She focuses on fur rendering in this piece as the two main focuses of the piece are eccentric furry animals interacting with one another. “With the bat and weasel” was also Depape’s introduction to doing illustrations targeted toward children’s books.
Depape stated that this “Flight Interior” was difficult for her to illustrate due to the complexity of the scene. With this piece, she added a lot of charm and humor with the goal of showing strong interactions between the characters and environment and hoping that with every pass of the piece, viewers can spot something new.
“Lit Candles” portrays a leopard covered in candle wax. To make sure she was able to depict the animal correctly, Depape did a lot of research, which is an aspect of illustration that Depape also enjoys immensely. This was a piece Depape found tedious due to hand drawing all the spots but it amounted to an illustration on the simpler side of her body of work while retaining a lot of elegance.
To view more of Depape’s fun work, you can check out her Instagram @kapaaheo.