Thanks To Marine Buffard We All Want To Be A Morning Person Now

You can’t label Marine Buffard’s work under one category, as her creative tree has many branches. This Paris-based graphic design graduate also works in brand strategy, and she managed to do all this while completing a PhD. When lockdown came around back in 2020, she decided to add more branches to the tree, as illustration and animation became part of her expertise and work as a designer, artist and creative.

Illustration was something that always accompanied Marine, “especially during my studies”, as she told ‘It’s Nice That’ blog during a 2021 interview. It was always a passion but it wasn’t what paid the bills for her… until lockdown came along and she decided to utilize her newfound free time to practice, turning her Instagram into a “illustrative journal” for her quieter periods. Marine also describes herself as a “big night owl”, so when deciding a handle for her social media, she tried to switch off her old patterns by “becoming a morning person” (which is her actual Instagram username). Once the handle was settled, she started waking up earlier and creating, also sharing her new creations with her digital audience: “this daily drawing practice was meant to build up a creative routine in order to induce inspiration in a moment where I lacked it, being stuck at home… a great way to keep busy and stay sane as we were stuck at home in Paris”, she said, as she practiced and developed her craft while also keeping herself distracted during these peculiar times.

Practicing on a regular basis clearly helped Buffard to polish her illustration skills, finding a new way to express her creativity and, as she described it, “some kind of ordinary life poetry”. Clear fine lines, bold blurry colors and movement are some of Marine’s signature stylistic choices, also using looping and transitions to tell a visual story through her illustrations. Her black & white sketches take the lead in her imagery, with the usage of color being selective and thought out to enhance her narrative. She also looks for inspiration in nature and in her moods, which are the elements that guide her chosen color palettes. “I follow nature’s guidelines as nature is a big inspiration for me and a recurring theme in my work”, she says.

She also combines illustrations with animation, which came as a natural progression of her imagining her illustrations and drawings in movement: “they have a life of their own, evolving, moving, transforming… They are very small stories and are meant to convey feelings that they wouldn’t necessarily be able to do if they were stills… Even when I do stills, they are often frames of a moving picture or are destined to be animated someday. In my head they all move!”. As for her process, she says that she starts sketching frame by frame and sees where it takes her, with the exception of just a few of them being planned out previously. This naturality definitely comes across in her beautiful pieces. Let’s be more like Marine and turn a hobby into a creative outlet.

Sources:

www.itsnicethat.com