Lauren Mortimer — Pencil & Surreal Illustrator, London

London artist Lauren Mortimer uses her outstanding skills with the mechanical pencil to create incredibly realistic illustrations, but with a deft conceptual twist turns them into something softly surreal. The result is a highly individual style, which helps her clients’ projects stand out from the rest with their own unique atmosphere.

Lauren's fuel? Nature. She draws profound inspiration from the beauty of the natural world, seeing her work as an illustrator not just as a career, but as a privileged opportunity to recreate and re-envision the world around her.

Approach

Lauren draws on cotton paper using a variety of 0.3 mechanical pencils. However, she also has a Wacom Cintiq tablet, which gives her an alternative way of sketching and working out her compositions. When she’s happy with something, she’ll print it out, trace it and rework it in pencil

Style

The pencil is dominant in Lauren’s work, and with her incredible shading skills little or no colour is needed. Her style often maintains a gentle warmth, despite that touch of the surreal. A brain-shaped soft ice cream, with a Flake, anyone?

Client list

Lauren’s clients include Harper Collins, Quarto, H Beauty, Penguin, Nike, the BBC, Nespresso, Running Press, Le Monde, Vanity Fair, Scholastic, Sony, Loro Piana, The White Company, Superdrug, and the BBC.