Llewellyn Mejia's paintings created in between commercial projects

Llewellyn Mejia is an illustrator introduced to us through his work with our sister agency, Anyways. The New York-based illustrator has a broad range of commercial clients from Fortnum & Mason, Anthropologie to Urban Outfitters and Patagonia. However, it is the work Llewellyn does for fun that intrigued us, a collection of paintings that display his artistic skill and interests in equal parts.

“I started creating these artworks because I was looking for something different to occupy my time between freelance projects,” Llewellyn tells It’s Nice That. “I feel that most artists have multiple voices as well as ways to express them.” The artist uses quite a muted colour palette but the shapely expression within his paintings adds a unique vibrancy. “I started to paint these shapes in forced perspective, eventually developing scenes and a world for the characters to interact with each other.”

The characters Llewellyn mentions are fluid, made of alternative shapes from painting to painting using dotted eyes to identify them as individuals. “All of the work is typically done in temperas, or ceramic stucco mixed with paint because I like the texture it gives an otherwise flat image,” explains the artist. “The ideas for the paintings themselves usually come from something obscurely cultural. For example, one of the paintings is about the alien abduction of Linda Napolitano in Manhattan, but this is just the baseline for the painting and I expand on that in my own way.”

Overall, Llewellyn says “the idea of creating art without being too precious has alleviated a lot of stress for me from projects that are at times very commercial in my life as an illustrator”. This mindset and the calming effect it has on the artist’s practice elevates the tactility of his paintings.