Olivia Smith | Illustrator & Concept Artist

  "The whistle of a train echoes through the thick night air, growing ever distant as it rattles away from the decomposing station. Your sweatshirt is soaked through with the acidic rain, jaw clenched and fingernails digging into your palms. Methodically the beast approaches, bathed in the light of a single flickering streetlamp. Fur bristling and fangs bared, it charges, tail whipping through the air. You widen your stance, bend your waist towards the ground, and suddenly you are not you. Instead a dragon stands in your place, opening its maw to meet the creature--"

​

  Art has the power to breathe life into imagination. It illuminates the worlds that words create, makes them real and tangible. This is exactly what Olivia Smith aims to do in her work. An imaginative mind often inspired by music, games, animation, and fiction, she creates characters and universes with the hope of making viewers hopelessly invested. Through a mixture of representational styles and caricature,  her artwork carries a rough and mature air while still being fun and approachable. With gestural line work and strong compositions she creates an illusion of movement and life in her pieces, drawing her depictions closer to reality. The characters she designs and the elements of fiction she incorporates build an implication of the complex worlds that she is excited to lead viewers through. Through a visual lens Olivia Smith’s fiction-rich work plunges the viewer into vast universes, leaving them enraptured and wanting more.