3 Illustrators That Have Influenced Emma Hanquist

Swedish illustrator Emma Hanquist shares the illustrators who inspired her editorial work

Emma Hanquist (@emmahan) is a Swedish illustrator with 12 years of editorial illustration experience. She grew up on the island of Gotland in Sweden and studied design and illustration in Gothenburg and Baltimore.

During her formative years–starting out in industrial design, moving on to Design School, and eventually focusing on illustration–she learned that you could gain confidence as an artist by trusting your inner creativity. You can draw many things, and you can be creative even within fields outside of your comfort zone. She found she had a love for illustration, and ever since her first job illustrating a magazine article twelve years ago, this love is still going strong.

Her influences have helped her find inspiration for her editorial illustrations and dive into all sorts of topics. She approaches each job with self-awareness and belief in her style.

Read on as we find out more about Emma’s big influences.

Sébastien Thibault

One of Emma’s most significant influences is Sébastien Thibault. She loves that he transmits very clear ideas in his illustrations and uses this medium to the fullest. From him, she learned to push her ideas further and wait for the right thing to come along. In his illustrations, Sébastien uses different symbols, different scales, and puts objects inside other objects. His messages are put forward in an intelligent manner that always manages to be fun.

Laura Liedo

Laura Liedo creates memorable characters and often works in full spread. Her work is almost sequential because something is happening all over the illustration, a style that really inspires Emma. The way Laura uses lines in her characters is also notable: keeping characters fun and creative in their shape and using them to create shapes and objects while expressing the whole feeling of the image.

Lisk Feng

What draws Emma to Lisk Feng’s work is her fantastic color palette. Lisk Feng’s work features vibrant images, full of detail while using a simple language of lines and shadows. Emma is inspired and aims at replicating the artist’s use of lines and shadows that make the illustration more vivid while keeping the idea and the composition simple.

Check out Emma’s Instagram page to view more of her editorial illustration work.
She also tells us what it’s like to be an illustrator in the video below:

If Emma and her influences have inspired you, check out her Domestika course Editorial Illustration for Magazines, where she guides you through the process of creating an editorial illustration for a magazine, from the sketch to the presentation.

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