Tracie Ching is the LAST famous digital artist that we’ll be discussing in this series. She is a little different because she is not only more of a digital illustrator than many of the other artists, but she also works in vector graphics.
Though she is known for her digital movie posters, this is certainly not where Tracie started. She graduated in 2009 with a fine arts degree and she specialized in mixed media and sculpture. However, due to a couple different circumstances, she did not follow that career path.
First, 2009 was right at the tail end of the “Great Recession” (which is NOT the same thing as the Great Depression of the 1930s ;). At that time there was not a high demand for Sculpture artists. Secondly, Tracie found that as she worked with other 3D artists, helping them set up art shows in New York, she realized that she didn’t mesh well with the culture or community there. Lastly, she found she just wasn’t interested in the kind of life that she would have to live if she took that career path.
Thus, unemployed and searching, Tracie began to teach herself the creative suite from Adobe in an attempt to learn graphic design. She used portraiture as her baseline for learning how to use the pen tool, color techniques, and other basics of Adobe Illustrator. This is how she fell in love with illustration. She found that it not only came easier for her than graphic design, but she really, REALLY enjoyed it.
As far as her style goes, one of the reasons that Tracie loves vector art is because of the smoothness of the line and the ability to make her work any size without pixelation (something that you may discover to be a problem if you work exclusively with Photoshop). She also loves that she can make an infinite number of strokes with here stylist, and the delete it in an instant with command+Z. Tracie also lives in a world of silk screening, so while the limited palette that she uses grew out of a need, now it defines her style.
Now living in Washington DC, Tracie does editorial illustration, magazine covers, and book covers, but if you search her name in google, you will come up with a lot of pop culture related art, specifically movie posters. She has worked for many big name companies including 20th Century Fox, Adidas, AMC, CBS, Fortune Magazine, Google, GQ, Marvel, MGM, Redbull, The London Times, TIME, and Sony Pictures.
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