Chester Holme’s illustrations revolve around color, line-work, and movement. With a focus on anything sport-related, his cartoon-like characters never seem to take themselves too seriously (but when they do, it’s not without irony). “I just want to make people laugh and get that spark of connection with me and the way I see things,” says Holme in an interview with Ballpit Magazine. “I’m a simple man, I’m not trying to change the world.”
Based in South East London, Holme has been hard at work since graduating with first-class honors from Kingston University in 2015. Amongst his selected clients are brands like Virgin, House of Vans, and Twitter. But according to him, he’s not one to experiment and tends to stick with what he knows.
“I’ve never been much of a sketchbook user, at least in a drawing sense,” he admits. “I start slowly with writing and note making, identifying the ideas or passages of text I want to work with and then fairly instinctively picking an image out of the air. I then do use my sketchbook to do a few very quick thumbnail drawings to solve any compositional problems and feel out any tricky postures, and then it’s straight into photoshop.”
Color is key in his work. “I like working with small palettes of strong colors, thick lines, simplified shapes, and flattened perspectives,” says Holme. “Finding my palette is 100% the hardest part of any project, I sometimes feel like there’s some super obvious and simple trick that everyone else knows about that means you can generate a beautiful palette with no fuss. I’m constantly looking for color pairings and combinations and scavenging them for my own filthy ends. I’ve got a massive folder on my computer of colors and palette ideas that I’ve found all over the internet, or in books, or out in the real world. When a new project comes along, I go straight to my folder, cobble a few scraps together and come out with a palette. It’s a process that works to varying degrees of success.”
Follow his hunt for color combinations on his Instagram page.
