Liz Lomax describes herself as a “three dimensional illustrator”. Before assuming that means illustration created in a 3-D CGI application, step back and think in more immediate, real-world terms.
Lomax creates her stylized, whimsically exaggerated images as small scale sculptures, which she then places in environments that she also hand crafts, and photographs the result to achieve her illustration image.
Much of her work is based on likenesses, or more accurately, caricatures, of well known individuals, including pop music stars like Sting, Amy Winehouse, Michael Jackson and the Rolling Stones, movie personalities, political candidates and various other newsmakers.
She also does theme based editorial illustration, with conceptual interpretive images much in the vein of many contemporary illustrators, but realized in her hand-sculpted models and environments.
Lomax starts with a sketch, and her sketches have a nice feeling to them that would suit being followed up as a finished illustration in traditional media; but she then takes them to the third dimension, modeling the figure, tweaking the likeness (which must work from several angles), then painting, finishing and arranging the sculpted figures in 3-D environments, much like dioramas, for the final photograph.
Her client list includes major publications like The Boston Globe, Advertising Age, Newsweek, MAD, The new York Times, Rolling Stone, The Wall Street Journal and many others, as well as a number of advertising agencies and commercial accounts.
There are a variety of her works on her web site in various categories, including some done just for fun.
The Telegraph site has a slide show of her work and some of her working models. There is a video of her working process for a sculpture of Noel Gallagher, and her blog shows work in progress, discusses her working methods and has photos that show the sculptures to scale as she works on them.
