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Vivid Visuals Highlight Athletic Bodies to Show the True Feelings of Sport

Artists strike a balance between muscular tones and bold visuals.
Rik Oostenbroek.All images courtesy of the artists

Artists add a graphic layer of bold illustrative visuals to portraits of athletes with muscular body forms. London-based creative studio FutureDeluxe and sports photographer Philip Haynes accentuate the strain of athleticism by juxtaposing human bodies with CGI, Illustration, collage, and stitch work.

The “Expressions” series captures an athlete’s attitude of breaking through “the metaphorical wall.” The project is collaboration between the studio and five artists from various mediums. The works draw from a wide range of emotions from aggression to euphoria. “We work a lot in CGI, so we were keen to experiment with as wide a range of mediums as possible,” FutureDeluxe explains to The Creators Project.

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Caleigh Illerbrun

Artist Caleigh Illerbrun illustrates dark twisted fantasies of woodland animals blending with human flesh. She intentionally keeps an interaction between nightmarish detailed creatures and strong bodies of athletes thus creating a new part of the body and not an additional costume layer. “I worked in acrylic paints, after a lot of pre-planning sketches digitally for general layout, Illerbrun says. “Then hundreds of fine layers to build up the different fur, wood, skin, and rock textures.”

Lola Dupre

For Lola Dupre the human body serves as a big part of her work, and athlete portraits “lended themselves perfectly” to her style. By combining the printed images on a wooden panel and sticking paper down, Dupre distorts and deforms an original image to extremes. ”The organic body forms morph themselves naturally in my process as the elements of the composition distance themselves from each other,” she says.

Rik Oostenbroek decided that he didn't want to deform or change a photo too much because “the photo would speak for itself.” Using techniques from 3D to drawing, he layered gold and blue paint and photographed them to keep the shadows. It makes his mix of paint and pixel float naturally along the model. “I’d really tried to do something I haven’t done before. Blend different forms of media into each other and create something unique out of that,” Oostenbroek explains.

Jose Romussi

Gabor Ekes

Alexa Sirbu

Click here to see more work of FutureDeluxe and here to check out the work of Philip Haynes.

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