Vexel Girls

The vexel girls by illustrator Linda Wilks are young, cutting edge, stylish and sophisticated. Her outstanding vexel portraits give Wilks consistent recognition and a great reputation in the digital art community. The super detailed illustrations reveal the secrets of pixel magic and inspire our senses. Vexel images look just as vector art but are actually pixel-based, adding amazing details and depth.

Empowered by the latest technology, Australian designer Linda Wilks is definitely one of the image-makers who started to set new standards in digital art. She uses her pen tool, talent, fantasy and creative freedom to create style-aware, fashion-conscious, cute & cool digital portraits. The girls in Wilks’ vexel artworks are pop stars, models, actresses or girls next door, but always with strong personalities and trendy looks. Sometimes playful and humorous, sometimes dark and surreal, Wilks’ pursuit of originality and authenticity always reaches high levels of aesthetic expression. Describing herself as hyper-renderer and uber-perfectionist, Wilks stays ahead of the pack with her sharp and beautiful looking graphics.

Vexel art occupies a special place between vector art and pixel graphics, between illustration art and graphic design. The word vexel is a combination of vector and pixel. Vexel images are layered or solid raster shapes, colors and gradients with the look of vector art. As vexel artworks are created using raster layers based on pixels you can’t expand them without losing quality, while vectors don’t lose their original trace quality and remain crisp.

Vexel art is all about hard work and originality. It requires a mix of dedication, inspiration and transpiration. Experienced vexel artists as Linda Wilks capture the magic of photos with vivid details and glorious colors, while bordering on realism. Creating vexel artworks is very intensive and requires often 40-100 hours of tracing with pen and lasso tools. The vexel community uses a strict list of rules to decide if an artwork is vexel or mixed media/miscellaneous graphics. Brushes are allowed for the stroke paths of the hair, texture and decoration elements, but may not be the main part of the artwork. Patterns, outerglows, patterns and textures are also allowed if used discretely. Not allowed are automatic traces, photo brushes, painting or airbrushing blends, cutout/blurring/sharpening/dodging filters, photograph overlays or backgrounds and gradient meshes. Gradient and solid layers must be visible. If an artwork has less hand-rendered shapes than brush shapes, the image is no longer considered vexel.

Linda Wilks houses her vexel portfolio at Vexels.net. Make sure to visit her website to discover more punk rebels, gothic Lolita’s, dream girls and exotic beauties.