Audrey Weber’s eccentrically enlarged figurative illustrations

Illustrator Audrey Weber has a knack for utilising ordinary human features and painting them into eccentrically enlarged characters. Her composed paintings balance figurative drawings with a psychedelic twist.

Based in Massachusetts Audrey lives on a small farm on the hills where she moved after studying theatre design, “but began to work more in illustrations in my last couple of semesters,” she explains. Since graduating in 2011 the illustrator has been creating zines of her work which allows her to “work through broader themes and ideas in a more personal way”.

In terms of materials and tools Audrey began “using ink and then moved to watercolours and now I work almost entirely in gouache,” she tells It’s Nice That. “I’ve been making a lot of individual paintings recently but narrative is extremely important to my process.” This application of narrative is instantly noticeable in Audrey’s pieces, through detail they encourage the viewer to imagine their own background behind the piece. “I write by drawing, sometimes I think of each new drawing as auditioning itself for a story, either the character or the colours or the action in the drawing.”

Audrey is currently focusing her attention on a picture book alongside her zine-making practice. In her experience, creating an ideal picture book includes “learning the craft of meaningful simplicity and exploiting the power of the text and image relationship”.

“I try to allow my work to rest in a place between poles," says Audrey, "between cute and creepy, between masculine and feminine, between structured and loose, between silly and serious.”