Cristiana Couceiro is a freelance illustrator who lives and works in Lisbon, Portugal. She has created a vast amount of work using various techniques, the technique most used within her works are methods of collage and the majority of them are editorial. For ideas for her works she likes to explore patterns, abstractions and colours.
Couceiro began her journey in the illustration world when she was a child, creating her first pieces of work using a combination of pieces of paper, old photos and finding any item she could, she enjoyed doing this as “to reconstruct stories and new realities with scissor and glue is powerful” to her.
She started her professional career as an art director, spending her free time making her collages, her free time mostly been on the night, gluing and cutting papers which she would then share in her blog.
Her works are mostly created using a fairly small colour pallet, with the colours red and blue been the more dominantly used colours within her works, these colours are mostly used within the compositional shapes that are applied into her works. Then she collects the images for her works by going to places such as flea markets and travels throughout the city collecting a number of different forms, for example, newspaper titles, photographs both classic and vintage, pieces of paper, other artworks and book pages which are then merged together to make a whole new form. These are all applied onto a cream coloured background, I believe this method is effective as each component of her works are different from one another, for example, the black and white images used create a high contrast against the lighter background used and the brighter colours used within the shape further contrast helping split apart each component making it easier to look at everything and keeping everything clear which in turn makes the statement of the piece all the more clear too.
Her works also mainly consist of the same composition throughout as she places the images she chooses in the centre of her pieces, further highlighting the focus point of her works. Furthermore, within a few of her works she includes her own strokes and type making look a bit more rough looking, which can help show her emotion within her works, for example, in the above image including Joe Biden she has written in a few words in a rough and untidy way almost as though she was angry when writing it and has drawn in a lot of crosses and germs and a number of other things which shows her anger towards him. This also giving her work a bit more depth. Cristiana is also known to create pieces that may seem more controversial to some as can be seen from her works above (the ones including Joe Biden and women’s rights) showing she’s not shy of expressing what she believes in within her works and not afraid to fight for what she believes in.
My Work.
When creating my work to reflect the style of Cristiana Couceiro by using the exact same colour palette, background colour and turned the photographs I used into black and white. With the background I used that same cream like colour she does. For my image choice I chose things that were important to me, similar to what Couceiro did for her works. With the shapes in my works I placed them underneath and sometimes overlapping the photographs in a way to make it look as though it was also made using collage. The images I placed in the centre to signify their are the focus points of the piece and then placed the shapes and lines around them. I used a couple of hand drawn streaks within a few of my pieces to give them that rough look that Cristiana Couceiro incorporated into a few of her pieces. Looking at her work and seeing she makes her work based on things she likes and are apart of her life, that’s what I also tried to do too as much as I could using my own images, for example the first image includes my two dogs as they are a big part of my life and I love a lot. The second been a football as it is something that I have loved all my life and is something that has helped me get through a lot of things throughout my life. The third been my Apple Watch which is an item that I’ve been using heavily recently to track my health and aid my weight loss journey. The final piece including a photo of my and my brother as family is something I value a lot, my brothers and sister more importantly.
All found images can be found on Cristiana Couceiro’s website here: https://cristianacouceiro.com
List of sites used for research:
https://hueandsaturation.tumblr.com/