Mia Hollenbackis a creator based in Florida. Her interests include DIY and craft culture, self publishing, illustration, and print media. While working a full time job, she is focusing on teaching workshops in order to connect with the local community through hand-making, creating zines for local zine fests, and working on a graphic novel that she hopes will be completed in the next couple of years.
You can reach her directly at [email protected], and visit her website at MiaHollenback.com. |
The Creative Process
"My creative process involves a lot of archiving. This means using journals, new and old sketchbooks, lists, and collages to inspire new pieces. A lot of my digital work can be found as sketches in my journals and sketchbooks. I’m constantly making lists of things or people that inspire me, and I utilize those lists to inform my illustration and zine making process. In fact, most zines I make are just archives of past work that I digitize. It’s a nice way to kind of place my work on time lines. When you read some of the blurbs on some of my pieces, it becomes even more obvious that my works are time prices for me. They are pretty telling of the feeling and thoughts I was having when I made the piece. For my photos, I usually like to use a mix of staged but still candid methods. Meaning, I try to bring my camera with me wherever I go and take photos that way. Then, by being conscious of color, texture, and space, I direct my friends while we are hanging out, so I get this cool feeling of causal-ness within the direction, because of the familiarity I have with my models, either because we are friends or we have taken some time to get to know each other before shooting, so there’s a comfortable feeling between me and them. In general, my visual art making process involves being conscious of and inspired by color, line, and shapes."
I wanted to create a new icon for my arts-tagram (bad pun, sorry), and I hadn’t drawn myself in a long time, so I decided to create a drawing of myself, in my style. Again, I wanted to experiment with color, line, and shape in this little doodle. It was more of a fun little piece to make rather than a serious experiment.
This is a self portrait that I took in late 2016. The light in the apartment I lived in during the time was fun to play with. Light and color inspire me, and I was going through a transformative period in my life, which prompted me to take several self-portraits that year. This is one of many I took.
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This is an image I made using a sketch in my sketchbook. I like drawing women, and this was kind of another experimental piece. I wanted to practice perspective, proportions, color, and background. This piece was changed and edited several times before I finished it this past summer.
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This piece is a teaser page for a graphic novel I’m working on. The original idea came about 2 years ago when I took a video game design class. I took the ideas and characters I created for the video game and decided to create a graphic novel. The genre of Outer World is a kind of coming of age story, with stories of friendship, mental health, hardship, dealing with trauma, and love. There are two main characters, and the one featured on this page is Celeste. The other main character’s name is Remi. I hope to have the first chapter out sometime next year, but it’s been on the back burner because of my job and freelance work. But I’ve been working on it, slowly but surely
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Just a big experiment with colors and brushes in ProCreate (the app I use to make my illustrations). I really like using a limited color palette when I draw with colored pencils or paints, so I wanted to try that digitally, using some sketches I collages together for, my sketchbook at the time. Again, Celeste from my graphic novel makes an appearance.
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This is an illustration based on a sketch I have in a book that I carried around with me when I was studying abroad a couple years ago. I liked it and decided to experiment with it digitally with colors and words. i was still new to using the program I use, procreate, so I just played with it. In regards to the words, it’s a little bit of a stream of conscious. I was going through a bit of a hard time, so this piece was pretty cathartic to create. Big Fun is a reference to a movie, Heathers (Tw: death, suicide, gun violence), which is a dark satirical comedy that has a bit of a cult following. The cinematography and the commentary throughout the film make it one of my favorite movies. The name Big Fun is a band on the film and their song is called “Teenage Suicide (Don’t do it).”
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