Illustrator Saturday – Lisa Falkenstern

Lisa Falkenstern has drawn from the time she was small, turning one page book reports into illustrated epics. Graduating from Parsons School of  Design, she has illustrated for many publishers including Simon and Schuster, Random House, Putnam, Scholastic, Marshall Cavendish. She was in the show The Fine Art of Illustration at the Hunterdon Art Museum and in the book The Best Two Hundred Illustrators Worldwide.

She has won a Gold Medal from the N.Y. Society of Illustrators and is in their permanent collection.

Lisa lives and paints in the wooded countryside of New Jersey with her husband and high school sweetheart , Ken, andtheir three dogs and four cats.  Below you will find two pictures of where all this talent is created –  her studio – nice space.

Lisa is working now on a children’s book for Marshall Cavendish called ‘A Dragon Moves In’ for Marshall Cavendish, on the fall 2011 list.  No paintings yet, she’s just finishing up the drawings, but she sent her Sculpey heads of the main characters.

Lisa works in oil, and the work in progress below is a portrait I did a few years ago.  She works with an opaque underpainting.  She starts with a wash of burnt umber, and when that’s dry, she scumble pure white titanium to create the correct values.  Then she starts to paint over that.  She uses a minimum of medium, usually using Liquin.  With this portrait, she had to use a number of photos to create it, since there wasn’t just one photograph that worked.

Lisa generally works in oils, but also in egg tempera, acrylic and digital.

Lisa just finished a large print on demand children’s book that is the third of a series.  She painted 69 paintings for that book, the Orca art was one of them.

I’m sure you enjoyed visiting with Lisa Falkenstern.  Take a minute and visit her website for more.  http://www.lisafalkenstern.com