Pencil Artist of the Week: Giulia Cortese

This week’s featured artist is Giulia Cortese, a pencil artist from Italy who creates color pencil portraits of sci-fi and fantasy icons ranging from Gandalf to Emperor Palpatine. 

Giulia uses Prismacolor Premiere pencils for both her color and black and white drawings (she also occasionally mixes in some acrylic paints for her mixed technique pieces). The subjects of her drawings feature a realistic style, while the backgrounds of her drawings feature mood-evoking colors and textures.

In many of her drawings, Giulia creates a vignette-like effect by dropping the background in all areas except the area directly surrounding the subject. This allows the viewer to focus on the drawing’s subject, while still allowing the background to set the drawing’s mood.

Drawings by Giulia Cortese

If you’d like to see more of Giulia’s drawings, you can check out her DeviantArt profile here. You can also check out her Facebook and Instagram profiles for more frequent updates.

What do you think Pencils Blog readers? Do you know someone who should be featured as our Pencil Artist of the Week? Let us know in the comments, or tag us on Twitter or Instagram @pencilscom.