DIGITAL ILLUSTRATION GALLERY

CHOOSE YOUR FIGHTER

(WORK IN PROGRESS)

Choose Your Fighter (work in progress), Valerie Caesar, 2026.

As you might have noticed, I love spot illustration! I create their sweet, discrete little selves to comprise the bulk of my illustrative work, and I usually collage them together to represent the ephemera of a mood, moment, place or time specific to me and my life. (You can see examples here, here, and here.)

In this way, they become a visual code, encrypted by my own personal memories; the inside jokes and psychological associations that I’ve made while living inside my weird, dear little consciousness.

Choose Your Fighter (work in progress video), Valerie Caesar, 2026.

Visually, they remind me of the soft, edgeless drawings in the children’s books of my youth. I think it’s safe to say that a soft, greasy oil pastel (digital brush) has become my signature illustrative medium of choice, especially atop a really toothy, pulpy (digital) paper.

In this video, the gridded background makes for trippy parallax play beyond the individual objects. It also gives me an idea I want to play with further: I’d like to make an exhaustive (to date) poster with all of my spot illustrations, sort of like a personal periodic table of the chemical elements. It represents an enumeration of a lot of the things that exist on an alchemical and fundamental level in my universe. More to come on that...

Choose Your Fighter (work in progress v2), Valerie Caesar, 2026.

UPDATE: I’m a bit further along in the process: I doubled the number of objects, using the imagery from the pieces linked before. It’s really satisfying to see them all together on a grid, divorced from their contexts but somehow a harmonious (if motley) crew. Clearly I’m not finished: I haven’t even arranged the objects to appear as though they are sitting on top of the grid rather than behind it.

In the next steps, I plan to add graphic elements, either to mimic the periodic table as mentioned earlier, or move completely differently in another, yet unknown direction.

A CLOSER LOOK

Watch this short video at the full screen setting to see the making of Choose Your Fighter (work in progress) from a behind-the-scenes perspective, and to view it in closer detail.