Ellen Jin Over is an art director, visual development artist, and illustrator. She’s also our featured artist in this quarter’s Illustrator Gallery! Her work has appeared on televisions all over the world for the last 20 years. Spirit Riding Free, now on Netflix, is her latest project. Before that, she was art director on Disney’s Tinkerbell movies for nine years.

She didn’t always know what she wanted to do with her life until her senior year in high school pushed her to figure it out. “I got lucky that my long-forgotten childhood obsession of drawing and making paper dolls suddenly came back to my mind one day and I decided to major in art. After studying illustration at Otis, I stumbled upon a job interview for a position in an animation company.” The rest is history! Her program of choice is Adobe PhotoShop, something we tend to think of for editing photos, not creating illustrations, but Ellen does beautiful things with it! She tells us more in the interview below.

Sarah Parker-Lee: How did you choose to use Photoshop over other programs?

Ellen Jin Over: Photoshop has been around for 30 years. When I was going to school in the early 90’s, that was the only computer software that was available for students at Otis School of Art and Design. It was mostly for graphic designers. It just happened that illustrators like me found it useful to create images too…Photoshop started to be used more in some animation studios for digital paintings [in the] late 90’s.

There are many painting software today such as Painter, Coral Painter, Illustrator, etc–some for professionals and some for “regular Joe” doodling. I just have not found any other software that is comparable to Photoshop. It’s fast and easy.

SPL: Do you only work digitally or do you do any hand drawing? What do you think are the benefits of each? Continue reading →