A wonderful pool of talented young illustrators brings an entrepreneurial spirit and fresh approach to the field. Drawing from the universal grab bag of artistic inspiration, their work ranges from esoteric to whimsical and every shade in between. Unlike their predecessors, they make little distinction between fine art and illustration. Less isolated thanks to organizations like ICON (the Illustration Conference), Picture Mechanics, and The Illustrators’ Partnership of America, they have more resources at their disposal to protect their intellectual property and greater communication thanks to the internet. Here are 10 talented artists —all cultural chroniclers and cool chicks—to check out.

OKSANA BADRAK
One of a clutch of talented young women who stayed in Los Angeles after attending Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, and part of a dynamic art scene taking off with a wealth of gallery exhibitions and studio open houses, Oksana Badrak has illustrated everything from Virgin airsickness bags to portraits of cultural icons like Etta James for Playboy.

Badrak’s charming illustrations are a touch Hokusai, a little Dali. Her cartoon-like world has a menacing underbelly—its cute animal inhabitants bust out of pop-art backgrounds and waves threaten white rabbits. Her chosen approach is often mixed media, and it’s not surprising considering her theater designer mother filled their house with bits of random fabrics, papers, and textures. That DIY influence is still apparent in her online store that stocks a small range of whimsical products. “A trend toward crafts helps us sell our limited-edition goodies in boutiques,” Badrak explains. “And the collectable vinyl toy scene is exploding!”

She also creates in 3D, with a recent video made with Paul Yeh, “1961” (music by The Flaming Lips). The piece was part of Resfest’s “By Design” program in Hollywood that presented works by Michel Goundry, Jonathan Glazer, Shynola, and MK12, among others. Badrak envisions a future where illustration spreads beyond the confines of the printed page onto every imaginable surface of our world. “Wouldn’t that be something?” she says.
www.badrak.com

TRISH GRANTHAM
Trish Grantham might paint crying girls sometimes, but her career has been anything but sad. In an inverse trajectory, she began as a fine artist and slowly took on jobs in illustration. Grantham started painting at 28 and got her first show months afterward. She’s 35 now and has had shows every month since. “I’m very lucky!” Grantham admits. “I got my first illustration job a year after I started painting. I did two T-shirt designs for Adidas.” A few years later she landed an ad campaign for New York’s School of Visual Arts that really got the ball rolling.

The self-taught artist’s pastel-hued paintings are filled with colorful bunnies and cute (often disgruntled) girls with Margaret Keane eyes. They are playful and edgy; Grantham can’t stand computer illustration, preferring to get her hands dirty making art. Grantham sifts through stacks of vintage foreign books to find images that inspire her paintings. “I find paper texts in foreign languages to be a most beautiful and intriguing medium to work on,” she says. After she makes her selection, she affixes the pages to a wooden panel, and begins to paint, not knowing where the work will take her. “I never plan my paintings; I let them dictate themselves.” Her work was featured on a 2005 Converse billboard campaign in her hometown Portland, Ore. Gift stores and bands have found her elegiac characters help define their messages.
www.trishgrantham.com

MICHELLE HINEBROOK
Michelle Hinebrook moved from Bloomfield Hills, Mich., to Brooklyn, N.Y., last year, a move emblematic of the shift between comfort zones inherent in both her career and life. Her illustration work combines photographic elements with bold abstract painting and often takes the form of oil and transfer on canvas for clients from Bitch magazine to Aquent.

Her style has recently morphed into meticulous large-scale (4 x 4 feet) enamel-on-wood paintings with moody titles like Pucker, Impulse to Touch, and Orange Flicker. They beckon you inside their compelling shapes, as if you’ve been transported inside human cells, á la Fantastic Voyage.

A merit scholar from Cranbrook Academy of Art, Hinebrook’s work has been in many exhibitions lately. She’s also a full-time teaching artist at Manhattan’s Studio in a School organization (she was a teaching assistant and visual arts instructor at Cranbrook). Whether abstract or figurative, Hinebrook’s color and composition tease the eye into a deeper look at her varying subject matter. If she’s not out exploring a different borough or encouraging a budding artist, she is most likely out walking her dachshund Sienna and deconstructing the shadow on a leaf.
www.michellehinebrook.com, www.studiofem.com

CAROLINE HWANG
Caroline Hwang paints, stitches, prints, and dreams in Brooklyn. As a kid growing up in Southern California, watching her grandmother crochet and knit inspired her to incorporate her love of crafts and quilting into her illustrations. The late Margaret Kilgallen was also an inspiration.

Texture, color, and humor inform Hwang’s delicate illustrations that often combine embroidery and fabric in a style that Kilgallen, with her love of “evidence of the hand,” would have admired. Hwang’s clients include Ph.D, Chronicle Books, the New York Times, and AIGA.

Her work is replete with organic elements; logs are a recurring motif and characters are often pictured in natural settings. “Initially, I was into children’s books. As a kid and even as an adult, I was inspired by the illustrations. After I left school, I decided to become more focused on editorial illustration, feeling that the subject matter in my work fit less with children’s books.

“When I first showed my book around, I felt that my work was too ‘feminine’ and the less feminine work was more well received,” Hwang explains.
www.carolinehwangillustration.com

TARA MCPHERSON
From bright happy girl power themes to dark gothic images with beautiful touches, Tara McPherson’s art shines in the details. Her clients include DC Vertigo Comics, Fanta, House of Blues, and Spin magazine.

“I had been making art my whole life, but I got interested specifically in illustration while I was a buyer/manager at a Japanese animation and art store,” McPherson relates. “I was exposed to a whole new realm of art that got me interested in the commercial side of things. I was surrounded by comics, art books, toys, animation, and video games.”

Hayao Miyazaki, creator of stories like Totoro and Princess Mononoke was a big initial inspiration. “I just remember thinking how cool all that stuff was, and how I would love to be an artist like that ... to be able to create an entire world based around my characters,” McPherson says. Her paintings are at turns poignant and graphic, and always informed with humor and intelligence. You can subscribe to a year’s worth of her prints, posters, and merchandise at www.taramcpherson.com.

SAELEE OH
Saelee Oh shares a Los Angeles studio with Martha Rich and Esther Pearl Watson, among other illustrators. She has worked for clients as diverse as Deutsch Advertising, Budget Living and Parenting’s Baby Talk magazines, Red Dress Shoppe, and Giant Robot, but concentrates on developing her art.

“My work definitely embraces all things feminine,” Oh admits of her sweet pastel paintings. But look deeper and her canvases have visual twists, unexpected elements that add tension. She has been busy with self-initiated projects like her 2006 Under Sea calendar (with Jill Bliss of Blissen.com) and getting Lemonade Maid, her virtual gift shoppe [sic] of limited-edition, self-designed, and illustrated products online.

“I’m really influenced by the traditional folk arts and crafts like quilt designs, paper silhouette cuttings, and fruit carvings,” Oh explains. “I looked up to the work of fine art contemporary artists like Margaret Kilgallen, Kiki Smith, Laura Owens, and Kara Walker. The picture books I read as a child made a huge impression on me and shaped my imagination, and continue to influence my art today.”
www.saeleeoh.com, lemonademaid.com

SHAUNNA PETERSON
Think Vargas meets Big Daddy Roth, and you have an idea of the sexy and irreverent style of Los Angeles–based Shaunna Peterson. Her clients include a diverse roster, like the National Hot Rod Association, Field & Stream, Ireland Tribune, and New York Press.

A class with illustrator Jason Holley at Art Center jumpstarted her career. “I think that’s when I really came into my own style, and developed personally as an artist,” Peterson says. To enter Shaunna’s site, one must click on a chicken held by Alice Cooper. As it spins, you are transported to her cartoon/saloon world filled with nipple-baring babes, robots, provocative double entendres, and splashed with saturated colors.

“I dream in color. I weld. My favorite color is lime green ... I started reading and collecting MAD Magazine in the sixth grade,” Shaunna says, offering insight into her influences. “I was born in June 1973, and my dad had been drag racing since 1970. From the time I can remember, he was taking the family to the drag races. Orange County Raceway was always my personal favorite. So I guess it’s safe to say the bulk of my influences in art come from being raised around cars, pin-striping, and pretty girls bearing ‘Miss’ titles [Miss Winston, Miss Hurst Shifter]. Thanks Dad!”
www.shaunnapeterson.com

RACHEL SALOMON
Rachel Salomon credits her grandmother for her aesthetic development. Raised in the Utah mountains, she spent afternoons surrounded by her grandmother’s Japanese art, mid-century modern furniture, antiques, old illustrated stories, and books about painters. Adding to her eclectic resumé, Salomon later competed internationally as a downhill ski-racer.

She studied fine art at Brown University and illustration at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, and she currently resides in Brooklyn. Salomon’s vivid paintings are peopled with truncated figures frozen in isolation or in pairs, like Ophelia floating down the river, or Snow White comatose in the forest. Patterns figure heavily, whether flowers curling out of Art Nouveau hair, sofa upholstery defining a figure, or fences constraining space. She’s illustrated everything from communist theme parks to Wall Street women and Iris Murdoch covers with her bold use of color and swirling shapes.

Clients include Warner Bros/Reprise and Blue Note Records, the Village Voice, Seventeen, Lands’ End, Target, Penguin Books, and HarperCollins. Her work has been in nearly a dozen group gallery exhibitions in the last two years and has garnered awards from the Society of Illustrators and American Illustration.
www.rachelsalomon.com

RACHELL SUMPTER
Native Californian Rachell Sumpter studied at the American Academy in Italy before receiving her BFA from Art Center. She and her cat Cookie currently make their home under the hazy skies of Los Angeles.

Sumpter’s clients include McSweeney’s, The New York Times Magazine, and Chronicle Books. She loves to draw and describes her work as informed by a deep and abiding love for sad songs, French New Wave cinema, and all things lovely and lost.

Her Grandma Tiny illustrated children’s books and sometimes paid her bills painting portraits. “Tiny was the person who taught me how to oil paint and bought me my first calligraphy set when I was 5 years old,” Sumpter remembers. Her parents are artistic too: Her mom created lettering for commercial greeting cards and her dad paints and draws.

“I’ve always been drawn to very flat simple shapes against complex patterns or texture, and have admired artists that work in that way,” Sumpter says of those artists who’ve inspired her over the years. It’s not surprising that Hokusai, Aubrey Beardsley, and Evaline Ness are on her list of favorites.
www.yeyegirl.com

GINA TRIPLETT
Gina Triplett lives in Philadelphia with her illustrator husband Matt Curtius. They share a studio, and often collaborate on projects. Psychedelic patterns and colors inform Triplett’s illustrations that often combine wonderfully curvy hand lettering. She has painted signs for clothing stores, decorated the cups at her local coffee house, and illustrated book covers. Fanciful rabbits, their pet Boston bull terrier, Wes, unicorns, and woodland creatures inhabit her happy universe. Clients as diverse as Surfer, Rolling Stone, and Rheingold Beer turn to her colorful modern style.

“I grew up in a rural area with a bunch of younger siblings. We did quite a bit of storytelling to entertain ourselves, and of course, we’d draw pictures to go with them,” Triplett explains of her early influences. Whitney Sherman, her college instructor, provided artistic inspiration, and an example of how to balance life and art.

After attending ICON in Philadelphia, she began a series of collaborative paintings with her husband. What started as a personal outlet has evolved into an illustration style that they now employ for jobs. And art directors no longer ask Triplett to make her illustrations look less feminine. “Now it seems folks come to me with jobs that anticipate a perspective that is inherently feminine,” she says.
www.ginatriplett.com