Wonderful varied work from Illustrators Ireland and The Association of Illustrators member, Alé Mercado. His work is created completely digitally, however, takes influence from traditional printmaking techniques. His projects mainly consists of music or film culture, but does so by drawing influences from a wide range of popular culture. I love the variety of styles that Mr. Mercado’s produces, and thought I do feel some techniques are more successful than others, his fortitude to explore them for all to see has to be commended. Check out Mr. Mercado website and flickr page for more of his work.

In the post today I received a copy of Delilah Dirk and the Seeds of Good Fortune by the very talented Tony Cliff. Delilah Dirk is the successful webcomic series, nominated for Shuster, Harvey and Eisner award. It has recently been picked up by publishers First Second whom will be releasing a paperback edition in August.

Besides Delilah Dirk, Tony Cliff also contributed to the Flight anthology, and keeps a pretty tidy blog. Packed with latest news, sketches and his popular tutorials.

I am slightly ashamed to say I have only recently discovered the talents of Wilfredo Torres. Worse still I only stumbled upon him though his Instagram, and not by picking up an issue of his current run on The Shadow: Year One. A mistake I will be rectifying this weekend. Mr. Torres has been working in comics since 2008, his previous titles including Salem: Queen of Thorns, Creepy, and Lobster Johnson.

What first drew me to his work is his very skilful inking. I almost feel “skilful” is putting it lightly, it’s close to magic. In a single frame Mr. Torres can make sure all the surfaces are clearly identifiable, no matter how subtle their differences. His lines are always crisp and defined, no matter how intricate an image. Also, a personal joy to look out for is the amount of ways he can render beards. To count the beard variations for yourself, hope over to his blog, The Mainstage.

Vietnamese illustrator Le Thu is currently working on a really interesting comic book project entitled ‘Titi’s Adventure’. It’s about a boy called Titi who enters a fantasy land where trees take human form and vice versa.

“There is a world, where plants become not so far from human kind…”

Le’s work generally is very cute and pleasing to the eye, and there are several interesting projects to browse through on her Behance page. Enjoy!

Jeffrey Scott Campbell is a comic book artist and one third of Cliffhanger founders. He got his first big break at Image Comics, working under the WildStorm imprint with creators Jim Lee and Brandon Choi on Gen¹³. Mr. Campbell remained at WildStorm developing series such as Dv8 and much later a Thundercats mini series, as well as the short-lived series, Wildsiderz.

Above all of these great titles, I think Mr. Campbell really sealed his place in the comic industry history books when he released the Cliffhanger series, Danger Girl. It was an indulgent spy thriller packed with action, humour, sexy women and Sean-Connery-type men. Basically the series played to all his strength’s and it was a huge hit.

More recently, Mr. Campbell seems to focus on cover artwork, including a popular run on The Amazing Spider-Man, and pin-ups. A Spider-Man series with writer Jeph Loeb was on the cards, but as yet nothing has surfaced. It definitely would be nice to see him working on a series again. Check out more of his recent work on his deviantArt page.

Brace yourself, you may step into the same trap that a lot of people do, and fall in love with Jake Wyatt’s work. Contributor to The Anthology Project, Mr. Wyatt’s style is deceptively simple. His typical process is darkening his pencils in Photoshop, applying flat colours, and a couple textures on top. I think a strength of his work, beside fooling us into thinking it’s so easy, is that his characters are so believable. If you, like I suspected, have fallen in love with Mr. Wyatt you can hang out with him just as long as you stick to these simple rules. Alternatively you can follow Mr. Wyatt’s work on his tumblr and deviantArt page.

Isabel Seliger was born in Germany, 1984. She studied Illustration and Comics at the School of Art & Design Kassel and she is now taking commissions. Her work can be quite intricate and a little abstract at times, and she tackles some interesting topics in her work (dwarf portraits intrigued me…) She has been interviewed over at Light Grey Art Lab, if you’d like to read a little more about her.