Photo: Art by Yvette Onychuk
Yvette Onychuk is an artist whose deeply detailed fantasy style caught my eye while attending the Evergreen Arts and Crafts Fair. An arts student at Evergreen, she originally hails from Redmond, Washington. Fittingly for the locale, a good deal of her artwork rings of otherworldly interpretations of forestlike settings and cryptids one might see in the deep dark woods. However, her art is not to be boxed in; she draws scenes and characters of all different types, and is an adept sculptor. The other week, I was able to talk to her about all of this and more.
A good amount of your work is in black and white. What are the reasons behind this choice of medium?
“Mostly comfort. I was always one of those people who would draw on their papers, so I am very used to the pencil and its shape. I like to be able to control values as much as I can in my art.”
“That’s actually one of the reasons I enjoyed my previous program, Critical Visions, as my teacher forced us to use a bunch of different grades of lead. It felt like a revelation.”
In regard to your branching out from that program, I’ve noticed on your Instagram that you have done a few sculptures. In your artistic process, how does that differ from your drawing, and where do you find similarities?
“Oftentimes my sculptures will start as a weird little doodle, like a lot of my drawings do. Sometimes I’ll just make a shape and try to do something with it. But I try to work from a strong basis. My dad’s an artist, and one of the first things he told me when I started drawing is that I should try and draw a skull [for a character] that makes some sort of sense. Make sure it has a jaw that will open, and space for eyes, and so on. So in sculpting, I’ll usually try and do that. The sculptures end up building off of the frame underneath.”
A lot of the characters you make are interpretations of humanoid figures; fantastical creatures with humanoid characteristics. What is it like experimenting with the human form in regard to shaping those characters?
“I mean, sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t. I have to scrap certain drawings sometimes, since they end up resembling certain things that I don’t want them to resemble; they just look weird, or, you know, too silly.”
“I like my characters to be mysterious, but I don’t want them to be super goofy looking. I try and make them look like a thing that could possibly exist.”
More broadly, where do you find influences?
“I often get compared to Brian Froud, which I’m very happy about. He’s the guy who did Dark Crystal. He’s a very big inspiration. Wayne Douglas Barlowe was one of the first artists I really tried to emulate when making creatures; he does straight up alien animals. My dad had a bunch of books with his art in it, so I have a lot of memories as a kid looking at them. I’m not super into Star Wars, like some people might think I am, but I am a fan of general fantasy stuff. Stories that go like: ‘oh, we’re going through the woods, where there’s a bunch of weird creatures and monsters.’”
“There’s also a lot of weird stuff just hanging up in my head at this point in my life. So there’s a lot of very random things that sometimes work their way into my art.”
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You can find Yvette on Instagram @artbyvee.ony. She is also a regular at the Evergreen Arts and Crafts Fair.
