James Russell is VL Magazine Artist of the Day

© Metro By James Russell

© Sphere By James Russell

© Downtown By James Russell

At E-scape Illustrations (“E-scape”) the mission is simple; to close our eyes and have fun imagining, designing, illustrating and writing about futuristic cities, off-world places, and how we travel on Earth and beyond in the future. As an architect and urban designer by training, I like merging structure, urban design and futuristic transportation systems into a futuristic genre to come up with fun structures and cityscapes of tomorrow. I like conceptualizing and illustrating space stations, inter-stellar vessels of all sizes and the docking platforms that serve them.   

At E-scape, I celebrate the “traditional art form.” I don’t use computers to borrow from existing photographs or futuristic art to generate new ideas. I imagine the worlds I want to visit, and I go there! I capture it the old-fashioned way; using a pencil, pen and a 5x8 inch sketchbook. All of my larger, primary illustrations begin from a new or pre-existing sketch hiding in one of many sketch books lying around the house. Once I decide which sketch grabs me the most, I start hand-crafting each detail on a larger board, using any combination of pen, marker, acrylic and maybe air brush until I arrive at that unknown destination that is a completed work.   

Whether it’s tomorrow’s cities on Earth or to a distant off-world place and back in the blink of eye, E-scape allows me to take my audience on a trip to some of the crazy, futuristic and sometimes fantastic places that I get to visit all day long. 


http://www.escapeillustrations.com/

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