Artist of the Month: Seerey Lester

One of my favourite branches in the field of commercial illustration is nature illustrations. There are many contemporary commercial and private artists in this field whose work I admire, not least Carl Benders, Alan Hunt, and Richard Sloan. Any one of these could have been selected as artist of the month, but I've chosen John Seerey Lester because where as his images can be equally as true to 'hyper life' as these others, more often than not, there is a strong element of the abstract present in his work also. Hyper realism, or photorealistic illustration, is an old trend thats been around for several decades now. Most popularly it is used to depict cars with chrome fenders or urban city scapes, but it is also a popular method amongst nature illustrators.

Often, these artists sell prints of their work and as far as I can figure out, don't actually do much commision work. Often they go on field trips and lug a ton of camera's with them, finding their subjects and all the reference imagery they need and composing the final image in a sketch book. Most probably the animals are often photographed in a zoo, but not always. Some of these illustrators do a tidy side line in photography also.

(If you follow the link via his name above then you'll see he shares his web page with Suzie Seerey Lester. I'm not sure if this is his wife or his sister, but who ever she is, she's pretty excellent also and well worth a look.)