Spotlight Ashley Ross's hip hybrid style

Darjeeling Ltd. by Ashley Ross.

Ashley Ross is a talented young illustrator out of Sheridan College who’s helped us with some sweet and sassy design projects. We recently had a chat about her style, her work with Rethink, and her offbeat celeb obsession.

Rethink: How did you develop your illustration style? What inspires you?

Ashley: When I was in high school, I always admired the illustrations gracing the pages of Rolling Stone and Spin. I’ve had an artistic side since I was young, so as a teenager it was life changing when I realized I could make art for a living. The most notable illustrator to inspire me has been Ralph Steadman. I love the bizarre in his artwork.

I’m also a media junkie, so anything relevant to pop culture can inspire me.

Rethink: Tell us a bit about your celebrity portraits.

Ashley: I grew up with Entertainment Tonight, and all those trashy reality shows. I think our celeb-saturated culture is both fascinating and repulsive. My illustrations have a certain amount of imperfection and rawness because celebrities are flawed. Sort of like my sarcastic attitude towards the subject is infused in the drawing.

Rethink: Did your style change while you were at Sheridan?

Ashley: I wasn’t conscious of my drawing style until my third year of Illustration at Sheridan. My professor Marco Cibola thought a drawing I did of Brad Pitt was sharp and encouraged me to pursue more of that material with my school projects. It definitely took me the entire four years to develop my way of illustrating, which is a hybrid of hand-drawn elements and digital colouring.

Rethink: How did you first hook up with Rethink?

Ashley: Rethink was a sponsor for Sheridan’s 2009 Illustration Grad Show and helped to create the identity for our grad book and website. Each student created icons based on words we were given—I did one of Amy Winehouse. Lisa Nakamura stumbled upon it while perusing the grad book and thought the style was perfect for her identity project for Crop, a funky hair salon.

Rethink: What was it like working on the Crop identity?

Ashley: I was given a brief outline and a ton of reference photos for the hair textures that needed to be drawn, which were to be used on the business cards, stationary and gift certificates. Basically I just needed to provide line art in black and white. The different haircuts needed to be readable at a small size; keeping the detail to a minimum was a bit of a challenge.

Drawing the signature hairstyles of Victoria Beckham, Farrah Fawcett and Jennifer Aniston was amusing, but my favourite was probably the “she-mullet” because it looks so absurd.

Crop poster.

Rethink: How did you work on the Pie Crust 101 project?

Ashley: After receiving the outline of the project, the pie recipe and the reference photos, I sketched out the various spots. Typically I work in pen for finals and my sketches happened to also be done in pen. Once I got approval from Lisa, I drew the pie ingredients, tools and recipe steps and scanned them into Photoshop. Then I just touched up the line-work.

Pie Crust 101, for the Pastry Training Centre of Vancouver.

Rethink: Do you work full-time as an illustrator? Any current or upcoming projects you’re excited about?

Ashley: Working with Lisa at Rethink has given me some great work experience, but as a young freelance illustrator I'm still not working full-time. I’ll be collaborating on a comic with a friend of mine in the near future... and I’m going to have my work published in Rolling Stone... someday.

If you’d like to contact Ashley about an illustration project or help her get published in Rolling Stone, you can email her at ma..@ashley-ross.com.

If you’ve worked with Rethink and would like to be considered for Spotlight, contact lian..@rethinkcanada.com.