Bodil Jane

posted by Beatriz Camargo July 31, 2017

Bodil Jane is an illustrator based in Amsterdam, who graduated from Willem de Kooning Academy in Rotterdam, specializing in illustration in 2014. She began freelancing in her second year of study and some of her clients include Unicef, Marks & Spencer, ELLE and WRAP. The artist loves to illustrate food, recipes, animals, fashion, interiors, plants, packages and maps. All of her work includes hand made elements and digital techniques. She became internationally known by her colourful, quirky style.

The way Bodil imagines and sketches her characters and their personal interiors is fascinating as she fills up the page and manages to add small details to every corner without making it overbearingly busy. Bodil integrates a wide range of colours in her work and still manages to make elements visually connected as she also includes a pinch of different cultures within her illustrations: Mexican ornaments, Japanese portraits of women and Persian miniature art.

The artist’s style developed consistently as her illustrations are handmade using ink and watercolour but being sensible enough to know when the use of mixed media is appropriate (due to her resistance of technology). She’s been experimenting more with textures of digital lines but still keeping the bases of her illustrations very analogue.

What nobody knows about her? In July 2016 she lived for a month on a boat of the Varda Artists Residency (VAR) in Sausalito – USA, where she was completely free of the rush and online-oriented culture that we live in nowadays. This was a great opportunity for a detox and also to find new places for inspirations in museums she visited in San Francisco.