Studio Visits: Caitlin Kuhwald

[Music] my name is caitlin kuhwald and i'm a freelance illustrator in la right now we're in my studio which is a garage that is attached to my house and the washer and dryer is right over there so yeah i was really into tracing paper for a while because it just felt really good to draw on that's me pregnant and everybody else in l.a needless to say i was quite unhappy and then here's what actually my ink line work looks like so that's all painted in ink and then i'd scan this into the computer and then do the coloring in the computer so this is for an illustration about the carolina chocolate drops the band i was really into very very very tiny brushes i grew up in southern california went away for a long time and came back i went to two different art high schools in san diego so i always knew i wanted to do i know who knew there was even two art high schools in san diego um so i always knew i mean i've been drawing since i was a kid and i was always taking classes and went to those two schools and then left to go to art college so it's always been the thing i did i went straight to college right after high school in 1998 and i went to the california college of the arts of arts and crafts which is now the california college of the arts i read comics as a kid and graphic novels as a kid so the idea of narrative through art has always been extremely important to me i can do likenesses really well and capture expression really well when i had just moved to philadelphia to go to graduate school i was still painting 100 at that time generally portrait work i was hired by eric skillman the art director at criterion to do my first cover for them and it was for the movie heaven can wait with donna michi and gene tierney and this is one of the things that i think is so amazing because i've done eight covers and one internal illustration for the zatuichi like huge gorgeous box set i've only ever seen one of the films that i've done a cover for beforehand and every film that he chose for me was perfect for me he's always been extremely good at knowing what really appeals to me as an artist like simple things like pattern and shape and faces and expressions which were like perfect for me so i did heaven can wait which was the first one and then a few years later the big deal cover that i did was the armor cord cover it's a big fold out and that was this like big long painting that i did so these are the sketches for the fold out cover for armacord the fellini film and this is the first sketch which is much looser just to kind of get something down based on what the art direction i've been given after i get feedback on that i do another round of sketches which is this one so it's much tighter much more realized and you can see as it goes through panel to panel it goes through each season so it starts in the spring to summer fall winter and we move things around just a tiny bit more some people get closer some people go farther away and then you can see here is the final so that was the whole painting [Music] so this is for the organizer so these were the first sketches i did just trying to get the idea across whether or not we want to see the main character's face or not marcelo mastrioni he has a beard and a hat and he's wearing glasses and one of his eyes is a different color so it was about whether we wanted to keep him anonymous or not there were such great faces in this movie the feedback for that was that the sketches of the crowd they were all looking too forward he wanted them to be interacting more so this was the final sketch that we came to so all those faces that were just straight on now have moved there's relationships that's what the final looks like [Music] and so what i would do is i take the black and white lines i scan them in and then i could do the color behind the lines and then i would actually color the lines themselves and i could fill these lines with black so you could see the color of the line reflects the color of the skin and the hair and stuff underneath it my work has changed so much over the years i think especially at the beginning it wasn't very personal there wasn't really anything other than maybe technique it was like solving the problems that i was given and i think it's only been in the last maybe 10 years where i've started doing stuff that feels a lot more me it took me a really long time to figure out what that was and i also think having a kid helped with that a lot i started doing some murals at a child's play space and it was an enormous project and for whatever reason i was like oh i'll just do these murals this other way that's completely different from the kind of work that i do and this seems like it's perfect for this particular assignment when i was doing i was like why am i not doing this kind of art all the time just brighter playful flat like children's book kind of illustrations which is what i've always wanted to do and i just started making my work like that and i've just been so much happier and i think that's the aesthetic that is the most me of anything that i've ever done before and the only people that i will do that kind of realistic style of work for still is criteria and i won't do it for anybody else but if they get in touch with me i'm like well yeah obvious obviously obviously i'm gonna do that for you so if you look at the cover for the awful truth which is such an amazing movie the characters in this cover are extremely realistic but i do much more shape-based things with their bodies and their clothes so there's kind of a marriage between the two what you see with my other work my my non-criterion work that's really flat and less realistic and i've always liked the way you could play with things that have volume and depth and then things that are flat so this is a fold out in the dvd and it's when they're trying to get the dog to come to them it's like a custody hearing for their dog because they're getting a divorce come on boys come on come on come on don't pay attention come on smith come on boys come on so she is very realistic but there's like some really exaggerated shapes in her clothes and her amazing hats her hats in this movie are incredible if you can make it as an illustrator you're really lucky because you get to do what you would do as a hobby for a living it took me a long time to realize what it is that i really enjoy doing the most and i like having time so that's one thing that's really nice about working with criterion covers it's actually a much more collaborative process than most of the illustration work i do there's a long deadline because there's a lot that goes into the process and i love that [Music] uh there we go

Channel: criterioncollection

Views: 3,561

Rating: 4.9488816 out of 5

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Id: v3atmhtpriA

Length: 8min 31sec (511 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 13 2021