Artist Spotlight: Pascal Campion

By: Sian Rips

Pascal Campion is an illustrator, concept designer, animator, and storyteller. Born in France, Campion has honed his foundations in art throughout his life, and first entered the professional world as a narrative illustrator. He has gone on to work for companies including Netflix, Warner Brothers, and Disney. Mainly working digitally, his color palettes are primarily subdued and minimalistic with pops of accent colors.

Big City Limited Edition Giclee Print – New Yorker Cover January 21, 2019

Campion’s style is very expressionistic with painted gesture strokes, and his characters are also simplified; depicted with few lines but with exaggerated gestures clearly depicting emotion. In looking through Campion’s work, there are many themes from cityscapes to natural forests with a mix of simplified spot and full-page illustrations. You can easily understand the mood which Campion was portraying as in Big City, a 2019 New Yorker cover cityscape, clearly capturing the expansive industrial scale between the highrises and their inhabitants.

Though he works in many fields, there is a strong continuity of character and artistic style. In addition to illustrative projects, Campion regularly posts comics of thoughts. The main character contemplates life and internal struggles to a feline companion. Sometimes these thoughts are simple and other times can seem very relevant as they show the thoughts of the mind of someone in an artistic career field. Campion’s art is beautiful and I was first introduced to his work after seeing both his comics and his magazine work. I picked this artist with an interest in showing how to apply and transform an established personal style to different fields of work. Please check out more of his work at @pascalcampion and www.gallerypascal.com