Quilling is a form of art that includes the use of strips of paper that are rolled, molded, and stuck together to make decorative designs. This technique is what paper artist and illustrator Yulia Brodskaya employs to create lush, vibrant, three-dimensional pieces of art.
Come to think of it, the style was used heavily in the 19th century by women of relaxation who quilled their time away between tea and gin. Today, Brodskaya’s post-Baroque hued curls are attracting major clients including The Guardian, Nokia, New Scientist, just to mention a few in her portfolio.
Not many represent the credibility of a handmade technique of image making like Brodskaya. She claims that digital pictures are not as fascinating to her as handmade ones. Of course, she admits that there are those digital artworks that she appreciates but they don’t arouse such enthusiasm like handmade artworks do.
Furthermore, Brodskaya gets her inspiration from a sheet of paper. Sounds awesomely ridiculous, yet that’s the origin of her magnificent artworks, ‘’If I manage to find some new unusual paper or card, I immediately begin to imagine the new ways of using it in my work’’, she proclaims. Her love of the paper is the reason she enjoys paper crafting.
She also admits that it took her some time to realize her own way of working with the material. Actually, Brodskaya had no idea that the technique she uses is called quilling. Despite everything, she’s keen on it and not prepared to shift on to anything else. Of course, he has tried both origami and collages but the quilling technique turned out to be her favorite.
Brodskaya is not only unique in her style of art; her monetizing strategy turns out to be different too. She doesn’t sell her original artworks, she creates the works for specific projects and her clients use the images of the paper works for their own purposes such as magazines and advertising campaigns. And she has won over world-famous companies including The New York Times Magazine, Starbucks, Hermes, Sephora and Godiva.
So where do her original works go? They are well kept in the good hands of Oprah Winfrey, Country Music Association, Ferrero, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and other private collectors.
Brodskaya’s services are undoubtedly on demand but making paper-based images for clients has its challenges too. For instance, once the paper has been stuck together, there’s no undo option, so she always cautions her clients about this issue in advance. Nonetheless, she gets enough time to think and consider the alternatives as the working process is quite slow.
One of her initial tasks was to create seven type-based pictures for the G2 section of the Guardian newspaper. She had only three and a half days to finish a series of texts primarily for Christmas season. She barely slept while undertaking this project as the quilling process is so time-consuming and she was on a tight deadline. But, the dividends were huge.
Brodskaya has also worked with Havas Group and terms the project as one of her favorites. On this one, she enjoyed the image-centered areas of her creativity, as much of the time she was creating designs to present themes in the organization’s 2008 annual report. It was a report with a distinction as it was printed with Brodkaya’s images on one side and the company’s information on the other. With quilling technique, she rendered a picture of a human brain and a lady with streaming hair – decorative work that represented her creativity.
Bio
Yulia Brodskaya was born in Moscow, Russia then moved to the United Kingdom in 2004. Before moving to the UK, she was interested in creative art practices including Origami, Collage, Textile Painting and Fine Art practices. She continued her education in art at the University of Hertfordshire and graduated with an MA in Graphics Communication degree in 2006.
She kept on experimenting and exploring ways of uniting each of the things she likes most; paper, typography, and profoundly definite hand-made specialty objects. She has quickly earned a global recognition for her imaginative paper illustrations and continues to create paper designs for clients around the world.
Many of her beautifully crafted paper works are on her website https://www.artyulia.co.uk/.
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