About Maria Medem
Maria Medem is a Spanish illustrator from Seville with love for storytelling. She produces vibrant and colorful editorial designs, graphic novels, and comic strips dragging us into her fantasy world.
The vast skies Maria depicts in her work, as the creamy and glowing sunsets are elements of her dreamy narrative that inspire our imagination.
What Maria loves most is creating stories. She doesn’t feel happy with a drawing unless it has some narrative behind it.
Workflow and Inspiration
Inspired by her hometown, Seville is a fairy-tale setting with elaborate architecture and sunny squares. Here she studied Fine Arts and is daily inspired by the people she meets. When Maria brings her dog for a walk, for instance, she always ends up talking with a few people of any age, suddenly finding herself in long and unexpected conversations. She likes it, especially when she speaks to people with an opposite perspective of life than hers, as an older person. These are those who usually keep talking about their surprising and driving stories.
Back to her home or studio, Maria turns these stories into illustrations, starting from her sketchbook. Maria begins by experimenting with different ideas and narratives or drafts sketches. The next step is a more detailed drawing to scan the design onto her computer and color it digitally.
María’s narrative tone makes her work a popular choice for editorial commissions. Her portfolio includes BBC Culture, AIGA Eye on Design, Zeit, and The New York Times.
Medem considers being one of her most challenging projects the comic strips inspired from Square2 for Kibling, a French design magazine that finds Maria’s style perfect for their purpose. She had to create something compelling, so she thought of placing a square in the center of each strip, but it seems to be challenging to accomplish it for many of the strips.
Medem also creates comic-style illustrations for her own books that she uses to explore other poetical and thoughtful topics.
Maria Medem’s Book Making
As a matter of fact, Maria loves making books. Cenit, a graphic novel published by Apa Apa Cómics, explores the space between dream and reality, and her book Èchos is a poetic contemplation on water. Her illustrations for Cedars, her most recent work published by Fidèle, have her signature narrative style to follow the work of poets, Youmna Saba and Todd Fleming Davis.
Maria knows how one can’t wear pink filtered lenses to see the world at all times. She knows that life has its dark sides but desires to give her work a joyful tone like fairy tales.
She indeed believes it is essential for artists to create fictional worlds to give some hope to their viewers.
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